Grade Retention Advocacy Fails by Omission

Similar to ExcelinEd, Ohio Excels has entered the grade retention advocacy movement as part of the larger disaster reform reading policy movement occurring in the US for about a decade.

There is a pattern emerging in grade retention advocacy that contrasts with decades of research showing that grade retention, on balance, disproportionately impacts marginalized populations of students without improving academic achievement but correlating strongly with students dropping out of high school. [1]

The key aspects of the new advocacy reports include the following:

Funding and support by conservative think tanks.
An emphasis on early test score increases (grades 3 and 4) and claims of no negative impacts on students.

One problem is that these grade retention reports are often promoted in the media in incomplete and misleading ways, fitting into a similar pattern of education journalism.

The omissions, what is not reported, are the most important aspects of this advocacy, however.

Consider this from Ohio Excels: Initial Results from the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee Analysis.

Just as ExcelinEd uses one or two reports to endorse grade retention (again, see here for why that is misleading), this report connected to OSU has some key elements and one fatal flaw.

First, as is true about almost all grade retention, the reality of retention in OH is that it disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations of students:

The retained students were between 2.7% to 4.0% of all students subject to the retention policy. Numerically the largest group were retained in 2017 (4,590) and the smallest in 2016 (2,892).4 Overall, some 55% of retained students were male (versus 50% of not retained students), and 91% were economically disadvantaged (versus 50% of not retained students). Of the 20,870 retained some 17% had a disability (versus 10% of not retained students). In terms of race and ethnic characteristics, the largest fraction (48%) of students retained were African American (versus 14.3% of not retained students), 34% were White, Non-Hispanic (versus 72% of not retained students), 11% were Hispanic (versus 6% of not retained students), and 7% were Multiracial or Other Races (versus 5% of not retained students).
Initial Results from the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee Analysis

This report then concludes positive academic growth in math and reading for retained students. However, as with other recent grade retention advocacy reports, these positive academic gains remain linked to grade-level performance, and not age-level performance.

In short, retained students are always performing academically at an older age that non-retained students (note that this report carefully compares retained to nonretained students without controlling for age).

This is a key problem since even one month of age difference correlates strongly with phonics checks (and early literacy assessments tend to focus heavily on decoding and not comprehension):

Therefore, none of the recent grade retention advocacy reports show a causal relationship between retention and academic achievement. In fact, there is no evidence that the retained students’ gains are not simply being a year older.

These advocacy reports depend on the public confusing correlation and causation, and media fails to make that scientific distinction.

Decades of research as well have shown great emotional harm in grade retention; the grade retention advocacy reports simply ignore the personal and emotional consequences of grade retention by hyper-focusing on narrow measures of academic gain.

Grade retention is a punitive policy that disproportionately impacts Black and brown children, poor children, special needs children, and multi-lingual learners. [2]

Endorsing grade retention is ideological, neither scientific nor ethical.

The rise is grade retention advocacy reports are failing by omission and children are suffering the consequences of using reading legislation for political gain.

[1] See the following: