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) ...

Getting Farther Ahead by Staying Behind: A Second-Year Evaluation of Florida’s Policy to End Social Promotion - This study analyzes the effects of Florida’s test-based promotion policy on student achievement two years after its initial retention. The report finds that retained Florida students made significant reading gains relative to the control group of socially promoted students and that these academic benefits grew substantially from the first to the second year after retention. The report also discusses previous research on discretionary retention and test-based retention. Additionally, the report compares Florida's policy to one in Chicago which has yielded different results, arguing that the results in Chicago are the result of differences in the two policies. (Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, The Manhattan Institute, September 2006) ...

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) ...

Sorting Out Student Retention: 2.4 Million Children Left Behind? - It is estimated that 2.4 million students per year were retained in U.S. schools during the late 1990s. This policy brief looks at some of the challenges around retention and presents a number of related policy considerations for addressing those challenges. The brief examines some of the known risk factors for retention, California's approach to retention and compares different groups of low-achieving students. (C. Ryan Kinlaw, Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, Fall 2005)...

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)...

Ending Social Promotion: Dropout Rates in Chicago after Implementation of the Eighth-Grade Promotion Gate - This study compares the dropout rates in Chicago before and after implementation of the 1995-96 high-stakes testing policy that required students to meet a minimum score on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills before being promoted to high school. Those who fail either repeat the 8th grade or move into new schools called "transition centers." The author finds that the implementation of this policy was not accompanied by a massive rise in overall dropout rates as some had feared, nor did overall dropout rates decline substantially despite considerable increases in student achievement. (Elaine Allensworth, Consortium on Chicago School Research, March 2004)...