Is Retaining Students in Early Grades Self-Defeating? - With substantial evidence indicating future educational struggles for those children who don't acquire basic reading skills by third grade, Martin West discusses the effectiveness of policies that retain students and provide them with intensive remedial interventions versus those that promote students to keep them with their peers. (Center on Children and Families at Brookings, 2012)...

Does Money Buy Strong Performance in PISA? - In this brief, the authors find that the success of a country’s education system depends more on how educational resources are invested than on the volume of investment, especially among high-wealth countries. Findings indicate that the strongest performers among high-income countries and economies tend to invest more in teachers and in high expectations for all of their students....

When Students Repeat Grades or are Transferred Out of School: What Does It Mean for Education Systems? - Does repeating a year in school help students? Not according to this OECD analysis. Grade repetition does not happen in Finland and Korea, the best performing countries in the PISA tests. Countries where students repeat grades tend to have worse results overall. Students pay the price in terms of losing networks of friends and facing negative perceptions in new schools. Transferring students tends to be associated with socio-economic segregation in school systems. (OECD Publishing, July 2011) ...

Grade Retention: What’s the Prevailing Policy and What Needs to be Done? - This brief provides a quick overview of issues related to grade retention and frames directions for policy and practice in ways that go beyond retention and social promotion. The report argues that "[n]either grade retention nor social promotion are recipes for narrowing the achievement gap or reducing dropouts. It is time for policy that doesn’t 'wait for failure;' it’s time for a policy that doesn’t react in ways that end up being more punitive than corrective." (Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA, July 2006) ...

Ending Social Promotion: The Effects of Retention - This report examines whether retention had a positive impact on students’ achievement growth. The authors found little evidence that low-performing 3rd-grade students who were retained did better than their counterparts who were promoted. At the 6th-grade level, the study says retention was detrimental to student achievement growth. The report represents the culmination of a six-year study on Chicago's efforts to end social promotion. (Jenny Nagaoka and Melissa Roderick, Consortium on Chicago School Research, March 2004)...