Staying Back to Move Forward: The Impact of Test-Based Grade Retention on Florida Students

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — An analysis of the impact of a promotion and retention policy in Florida public schools adds to the limited research on test-based promotion and suggests its value to students. A study by University of Arkansas researchers Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters showed that when students who didn’t pass the state accountability test repeated third grade, “they learned at a faster rate than if they had been promoted.”

“Third grade is seen as a pivotal year because if students don’t learn the foundations, such as reading, they have great difficulty learning in future grades,” Greene said. “Traditionally the view of educators has been that retaining students stigmatizes them so that they give up, but this evidence suggests that students may be more harmed if they are pushed into the next grade for which they are not prepared.”

Greene and Winters analyzed two years of data showing student test scores and progress, with results that held true through two methods of data analysis. In an article in a recent issue of Education Finance and Policy, published by MIT Press, the researchers concluded that their study provided evidence that “Florida’s policy has substantially improved the academic proficiency of the lowest-performing students in the state.”

Because the data from Florida schools allowed Greene and Winters to track individual performance on tests, they were able to compare students who were retained with students who were promoted. The researchers found that students who were retained did slightly better than socially promoted students in reading in the first year after retention and substantially better in the second year.

“That the impact of the policy for reading scores grows after two years is consistent with the idea that retained students will continue to gain ground in reading relative to promoted students in later years as academic material becomes more difficult,” the researchers wrote.

In fact, the researchers found that students who had been retained demonstrated higher academic skills when they entered fifth grade than the promoted students did upon leaving fifth grade.

Nationally, more than 17 percent of public school students are required to show a level of academic preparation on a standardized test to be promoted to the next grade. In the past, decisions about promotion and retention were subjective, resulting from consultation among teachers, administrators and parents. As a result, it was difficult for researchers to pull together comparable data or arrive at useful conclusions.

“The existence of more objective retention policies across the nation now provides researchers with an opportunity to create more meaningful groups with which to compare retained students than were available to researchers previously,” Greene and Winters wrote.

They suggest that education researchers should focus on the data available from objective retention policies “to reopen the empirical discovery of the effect of grade retention.”

Greene and Winters point to the need for further study to understand the longer-term effects of Florida’s retention policy, such as the probability that a student who repeated the third grade would go on to graduate from high school. They also note that test-based retention policies in other grades could have different effects. For example, it is possible that the negative effect on self-esteem could increase in the later grades, “as students become more attached to their peers.”

Greene holds an endowed chair and is head of the department of education reform in the College of Education and Health Professions, University of Arkansas. Winters is a University of Arkansas Doctoral Academy Fellow in economics.