Category Archives: education

education

True Detective: It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World, pt. 2

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I started to say True Detective (HBO original series) is gold ore and then to pursue a metaphor of finding something of value in an impure original form.

But one of the two main characters is named Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) so I will say instead, True Detective is iron ore and we can find something of value—something tarnished, yes—in an impure original form.

I want to start with the tarnished, the rust, that few people have confronted.

Emily Nussbaum sees True Detective through the lens of all that it fails to achieve:

Like many critics, I was initially charmed by the show’s anthology structure (eight episodes and out; next season a fresh story) and its witty chronology, which chops and dices a serial-killer investigation, using two time lines…

On the other hand, you might take a close look at the show’s opening credits, which suggest a simpler tale: one about heroic male outlines and closeups of female asses. The more episodes that go by, the more I’m starting to suspect that those asses tell the real story.

The women in the episodes, Nussbaum explains, are “paper-thin”; they serve as women often do in art made by men—as props, as symbols, as embodiments rendered meaningful only in the context of the men who gain most of the attention when the camera isn’t focused on the bared curves of women titillating and pleasing those men (and the audience, mostly men, we may assume). “Wives and sluts and daughters—none with any interior life,” she recognizes.

I think Nussbaum’s explication is important, not to set True Detective aside, but to mine that rust from the ore. I think there is much here of value—even conceding the entrenched failures of men making art as if women truly and inevitably are “paper-thin,” “a simple prop to occupy [their] time.”

Many people have noted that about 5% of pop culture is brilliant and the remaining 95% is trash. From production value to acting, True Detective aspires to that 5%, and I think it is often successful.

Even (maybe especially) with the mind disengaged in rational ways, each episode is mesmerizing for the senses.

But if we approach the series as a work of collaborative art (director, write, actors) that necessarily involves the viewer as yet another collaborator, we may find that True Detective is a tale possibly subtitled “It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World.”

Yes, women are cheated in (and cheated on) this narrative from HBO, but women are cheated in (and cheated on) the real world also. Children too are central in the series, often as the victims they are in real life also.

And if we are to decide whether to applaud True Detective for its often soaring craft or to denounce the series for its cliched and tone deaf paternalism, misogyny, and chauvinism, I think we must also start with genre—not just what the series is about but what form this series is taking to shape that tale.

Taken for its commitment to form, True Detective is noir fiction, a genre itself both illuminating the sexism of the human condition and flawed because of the sexism of the human condition entrenched in the genre.

“Noir fiction has attracted some of the best writers in the United States (mostly) and many of its aficionados are among the most sophisticated readers in the crime genre,” explains Otto Penzler. “Having said that, I am constantly baffled by the fact that a huge number of those readers don’t seem to know what noir fiction is,” adding:

Look, noir is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are doomed. They may not die, but they probably should, as the life that awaits them is certain to be so ugly, so lost and lonely, that they’d be better off just curling up and getting it over with. And, let’s face it, they deserve it.

Pretty much everyone in a noir story (or film) is driven by greed, lust, jealousy or alienation, a path that inevitably sucks them into a downward spiral from which they cannot escape. They couldn’t find the exit from their personal highway to hell if flashing neon lights pointed to a town named Hope. It is their own lack of morality that blindly drives them to ruin.

And there is Rust Cohle and his partner Marty Hart—deeply flawed men blinded by their lusts and trapped between justice and injustice.

Are there better ways to do that story? There was Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue, and Bruce Wayne/Batman endures—both of which are examinations of that exact dynamic of justice/injustice and flawed men.

Either these are archetypal characters and narratives or evidence that the paternalism of film and literature have imposed these characters and narratives onto the world by sheer force.

But as I watch the series (as of this writing, the sixth episode), I have been reminded of John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, a literary and complex novel that searches the human soul as well as the landscape of justice and injustice, as this excerpt shows:

His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark.

-Isaiah 56:10

In late August, 1966, the city jail in Batavia, New York, held four regular prisoners, that is, four prisoners who were being kept on something more than an overnight basis. Three had been bound over for trial; the fourth was being held, by order of the court, until the County could administer a psychiatric examination. The identity of this fourth prisoner was not yet known. He seemed to be about forty. He’d been arrested on August 23rd for painting the word love in large, white, official-looking letters across two lanes of Oak Street, just short of the New York State Thruway. As the police were in the act of arresting him he had managed to burn all the papers in his billfold (dancing up and down, shaking like a leaf), and he refused to say now a halfway sensible word about himself, except that he was “an anarchist, a student.” His face was slightly disfigured by what looked like a phosphor burn — the kind men get in wars. Whether he was actually a student (he was an anarchist, all right) there was no way of telling. He seemed too old for that, and there was no college in Batavia; but the town was not large and they knew he was not from there.

The Sunlight Dialogues is hard; it demands a great deal of the reader in terms of time as well as concentration.

I think the same of True Detective in the sense that we must not take the work on face value only, we must not allow ourselves to be mesmerized, and we must not see the “paper-thin” women as endorsements, but mirrors of the very real ways life remains a man’s (hostile) world.

And I remain committed to mining the rust from the ore in this show because we remain faced with much the same in the real world we fail to excavate and then re-imagine each day.

True Detective is flawed as is the human condition. We can do better in both, but not by giving in to the nihilism of the noir that is both creation and mirror.

It’s still a man’s (hostile) world, but it doesn’t have to be.

Critical Pedagogy, education

Knowledge: Not If, but How (and Who Decides)

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As I have posted before, progressivism and whole language have a long history of being blamed for failure when in reality neither has been practiced in any substantial way by teachers. While school policies and classroom practices have remained committed to traditional approaches and behavioral groundings, it is likely more accurate to describe schooling in the U.S. as dominantly bureaucratic—often failing any ideology whether or not, as Harry Webb notes, schools and colleges of education are almost exclusively progressive.

And thus, education remains mired among some in a constant tension between so-called traditional and progressive commitments; as Webb explains, that tension is itself reductive and misleading:

The differences between educational progressives and traditionalists, although often defined in terms of how they go about teaching, are really more fundamental even than that. Progressives and traditionalists actually have different goals. They are trying to achieve different ends. To progressives, traditionalists are trying to fill children’s heads up with rote, disconnected facts. To traditionalists, progressives are trying to ‘facilitate’ the development of nebulous skills; skills that often cannot be defined and certainly not assessed. Of course, there are always those who are quick to cry, ‘False choice! You can have both nebulous skills and rote, disconnected facts.’ Of course there are.

There is a continuum here: on the far right, rote memorization, and on the left, touchy-feely “do your own thing” playtime. While as a critical educator I have serious problems with positivism, behaviorism, and the cultural knowledge concepts promoted by E.D. Hirsch, I agree with Webb, a traditionalist, that both extremes fall well short of what most thoughtful educators are pursuing regardless of their pedagogical commitments or educational philosophies.

So let me enter this debate with a few examples of what critical educators see as the foundational problems with how schools treat the pursuit of knowledge—with the full disclosure here that how the real world of teaching happens is often out of focus when compared to the more complex theories and philosophies identified. In other words, when a school or teacher claims to be implementing essential questions, it is unlikely that is the case. The same can be said of direct instruction, cooperative learning, authentic assessment, and so forth.

If there are educators who say content doesn’t matter, I don’t know any. It is a provocative claim, none the less. Of course content matters, but for critical educators, authoritarian static knowledge is the problem because of the “authoritarian” and “static”—not the knowledge.

Whether directly or indirectly, when a teacher prescribes that all children learn X without consideration for the needs or interests of the students and without any opportunity to examine whether or not that content should be accepted  uncritically, education has failed.

Another issue for critical and even progressive educators is the concept of when knowledge is acquired, when (and how) content becomes automatic.

Treating content as value-free, discrete, linear, and sequential is the problem; not the knowledge itself.

Assuming that the human mind is essentially analytic—learning from part to whole—and that most knowledge must be acquired before real thinking, maybe critical thinking, can occur are the problems.

So I want two offer to examples of what I mean.

First, I happen to know a huge amount of content in a fairly wide range of disciplines. Some is very useful on Jeopardy! and a great deal is incredibly useful for my roles as scholar, teacher, and writer.

For example, if I see a panel from a Silver Age Marvel comic book, I am able most of the time to tell you who pencilled and inked the artwork. I also regularly cite research aloud when I am teaching, often identifying the author, year, and even page of the research.

None of this happened by rote memorization that is all too common in traditional schooling. I did not have any of this assigned, I did not study any of this for a multiple choice or true/false exam.

Throughout the 1970s, while wearing a back brace for scoliosis, I retreated into the world of collecting comic books—amassing about 7000 comics that I read, re-read, and carefully catalogued before storing them all in plastic bags.

In the mid- to late 1990s, I wrote a dissertation on Lou LaBrant, meticulously gathering everything she wrote and everything others wrote or said about here before writing a book-length biography of her life and career.

What are notable about these experiences and how I have come to gain and retain so much knowledge?

  • Both grew from my choice—one as a teenager and the other as a grown man in my mid-30s. (My point: Let’s not assume that children have no ability to make real and substantial choices, just as, see below, let’s not romanticize childhood as a time when all children’s choices are good for them and that all adult imposition is oppressive.)
  • Both were experiences with rich and complex content. Nothing was easy about either experience (despite what people misunderstand about comic books). This is about challenging content (and not the misused and misleading concept of rigor)—in the two sense of the content is complex and thus challenging and that learners should challenge the content in order to learn it.
  • Both required that I engaged in a great deal of synthesis, and thus re-creation—resulting in experiencing, re-experiencing, and thus coming to acquire an evolving memorization that has context.
  • Both were aided substantially by my having access to authorities on the content I was pursuing.

Yes, knowledge matters, but who decides what knowledge matters is essential to address and how that knowledge is acquired is also central. It fails our goals of acquiring knowledge, then, if we only honor the acquisition of knowledge before any real engagement occurs on a complex level.

Each discipline needs to take a step back from linear, discrete, and analytical assumptions about acquiring knowledge in order to identify when that approach is genuinely essential. (And I suspect it is far less often than is traditionally practiced.)

Next, let me return to the continuum noted about, adding that to the far right we fall into the trap of cynicism (no child knows what is good for her/him) and that to the far left, the trap of romanticism (just leave children alone and allow their natural curiosity to work).

Just as knowledge acquisition may come after deep and rich engagement with experiences (as I detailed above), students may come to “choose” and recognize value in knowledge after being asked to learn it. And so a final example.

Too often traditional approaches to teaching and learning have been (and are) reduced (and more often with students identified as “weak”) to isolated and rote experiences with knowledge. (This can be traced to the failure of the cult of efficiency found in the bureaucracy of schooling [1].)

For example, what has counted (and counts) for “learning about the presidents” in social studies or history class is memorizing the presidents in order to be recited on a test. This is the sort of real-world traditionalism that progressive and critical educators balk at—and recognize as all too common, again, especially for certain students. And there is a cynicism and deficit view of children embedded in that sort of teaching.

However, a romantic view of children may seek to leave whether or not children learn about the presidents up to the students (again, making the mistake of ignoring context), and traditionalists are rightly concerned that many children would find little initial interest in the presidency—despite that core knowledge being quite important for each child as a member of a democracy and to the wider democracy itself.

Instead, then, asking students—either individually or in groups—to choose one president as a research project and to use that example to identify and examine the powers of presidents in the U.S. is the sort of assignment a critical educator would embrace.

Many students are likely to come to appreciate the need to understand the presidency after this experience, and we are failing students by the fault of romanticism if we allow them only to pursue what they initially believe is important.

For critical educators, our concern is with authoritarian education, but not with authoritative teachers. And our goal is a classroom with a teacher/student among students/teachers [2]. Teaching and learning are collaborative, but the ultimate authority is still the teacher.

From his traditional commitments (ones Webb strives to advocate for in real and complex ways), Webb asserts: “By contrast, progressive education is a mirage.”

I would argue that the ways in which both progressive and traditional practices are found in schools are mirages—in the sense that they fail our goals of knowledge acquisition as a vehicle for human and social agency. In fact, those failures, I think, have little to do with progressivism and traditionalism, but much to do with the romanticism and cynicism I have examined above.

[1] Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[2] Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare to teach. Trans. D. Macedo, D., Koike, & A., Oliveira. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

——— . (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Trans. P. Clarke. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

——— . (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

education, education reform, reading

Retain to Impede: When Reading Legislation Fails (Again)

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I remember vividly during one of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union addresses watching the president state that he was seeking education policy that would ensure that all third graders would be able to read; he did the emphatic fist with thumb slightly extended to prove he was serious.

I also remember thinking—and possibly saying aloud to the TV—”No, they won’t.”

It is a silly political thing to pretend that the teaching of reading is somehow determined by political policy. It is a ridiculous thing to think that naming that political policy something clever matters as well.

But it also a silly and ridiculous thing that seemingly will never end.

In South Carolina, the state senate is considering Read to Succeed, a reading policy built in part on the Florida formula (Just Read, Florida!) that has a great deal of political support but has been unmasked as yet another misleading education “miracle” that wasn’t.

The most flawed aspect of Read to Succeed is that it mimics Florida’s third-grade retention policy that will retain third graders based on standardized test scores.

The Education Oversight Committee (EOC) has examined the Read to Succeed act, and offers an At a Glance on retention and lessons learned from Florida.

While the At a Glance appears research-based and comprehensive, the Read to Succeed act and the EOC support actually represent what Matthew DiCarlo has identified as a central problem with policy built on a misuse of data:

The recent release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the companion Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) was predictably exploited by advocates to argue for their policy preferences. This is a blatant misuse of the data for many reasons that I have discussed here many times before, and I will not repeat them….

But they are not policy evidence. Period….

But, as I’ve said before, there’s a very large group of us out here who are willing to applaud any high-level leader who refuses to misuse evidence, whether or not we happen to agree with their substantive policy positions. I’m sure there are leaders like that out there, and I wish they were more visible.

In the exact same way as DiCarlo details above about misusing NAEP data for political gain, the EOC is failing in its support of Read to Succeed directly and third-grade retention inclusive.

The EOC’s At a Glance cites only four sources, one of which, Greene and Winters, has been reviewed, concluding:

The report reviewed here concludes that Florida’s recently instituted policy of test-based retention has helped academically struggling elementary school students improve their reading. According to the review, the report overstates the effect of retention on student achievement.

Further, the At a Glance fails to identify a strong body of research that refutes the claims made about the Florida formula and a four-decades body of research that rejects grade retention (See Sources below).

Reading problems are not primarily in our schools. Reading and all literacy problems are overwhelmingly reflections of larger social problems related to inequity and poverty.

Reading and literacy solutions, then, are not to be found in legislation and clever program names—especially when those policies are built on partial and politically manipulated evidence, and especially when those name serve to mislead.

SC is considering using partial evidence a reading policy better named Retain to Impede.

—

Recommended

Commentary: When our students are living in a book desert:

But Xavier wanted a different life; he wanted to be a doctor. He wanted to write about his experiences. What should he read?

I compiled a list of my favorite books, making sure to include teen favorites, books about the medical profession and topics that might speak to a kid growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood. When I gave him the list, he contemplated it with his usual care, made a small check mark next to the books that looked interesting, and looked up. “Where can I get them?” he asked.

And that’s where our story stalls out. Because that’s when I realized that Xavier was living in a book desert.

SOURCES

“Florida Miracle” 

Review of Closing the Racial Achievement Gap, Madhabi Chatterji

Water into Wine?, Julian Vasquez Heilig

Lurking in the Bushes, Julian Vasquez Heilig

Parsing the Florida “Miracle,” Diane Ravitch

The Test-Based Evidence on the “Florida Formula,” Matthew Di Carlo

Editorial: Florida needs no advice from Jeb Bush on education policy, Jac Versteeg

Review of Getting Farther Ahead by Staying Behind, Derek C. Briggs

Grade Retention

Hold Back to Move Forward? Early Grade Retention and Student Misbehavior, Umut Özek

Test-based accountability has become the new norm in public education over the last decade. In many states and school districts nation-wide, student performance in standardized tests plays an important role in high-stakes decisions such as grade retention. This study examines the effects of grade retention on student misbehavior in Florida, which requires students with reading skills below grade level to be retained in the 3rd grade. The regression discontinuity estimates suggest that grade retention increases the likelihood of disciplinary incidents and suspensions in the years that follow. The findings also suggest that these adverse effects are concentrated among economically disadvantaged students

Retaining Students in Grade A Literature Review of the Effects of Retention on Students’ Academic and Nonacademic Outcomes, Nailing Xia, Sheila Nataraj Kirby (2009)

Our review of these 91 studies indicates that grade retention is associated with gender, race, SES, age for grade, student mobility, family and parental characteristics, prior academic achievement, prior behavioral and socioemotional development, and student health. Converging evidence suggests that grade retention alone is not an effective intervention strategy for improving academic and longer-term life outcomes. In general, retention does not appear to benefit students academically. Although some studies have found academic improvement in the immediate years after retention, these gains are usually short-lived and tend to fade over time. Past research has consistently shown that retained students are at significantly increased risk of dropping out of school. Although only a few studies have examined the effects of retention on postsecondary outcomes, the available evidence suggests negative effects on enrollment in postsecondary education and on employment outcomes in adulthood. Overall, the literature indicates mixed findings on attitudinal, socioemotional, and behavioral outcomes among the retained students….Our review found fruitful avenues of research, most notably the impact of supportive interventions (such as early identification of at-risk students, academic instructional services provided in and out of school, and different types of intervention strategies) on proximal and future student outcomes.

The Spillover Effects of Grade-Retained Classmates: Evidence from Urban Elementary Schools, Michael A. Gottfired, American Journal of Education 119 (May 2013)

Retention, Social Promotion, and Academic Redshirting: What Do We Know and Need to Know?, Nancy Frey, Remedial and Special Education, volume 26, number 6, November/December 2005, pages 332-346

The evidence gathered in the last 30 years on the practice of retention suggests that it is academically ineffective and is potentially detrimental to children’s social and emotional health. The seeds of failure may be sown early for students who are retained, as they are significantly more likely to drop out of high school. Furthermore, the trajectory of adverse outcomes appears to continue into young adulthood, when wages and postsecondary educational opportunities are depressed.

Dropout Rates after High-Stakes Testing in Elementary School: A Study of the Contradictory Effects of Chicago’s Efforts to End Social Promotion, Elaine M. Allensworth, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), pp. 341-364

Alternative to Grade Retention, Jimerson, Pletcher, and Kerr (2005)

Given the accumulating evidence that grade retention is an ineffective and possibly harmful intervention, it is imperative that school administrators advocate for “promotion plus” policies that depend on effective, evidence-based interventions. The issue for secondary school educators is twofold. Not only must educators determine whether retention is appropriate for a given student, they also need to address the negative academic, social, and emotional consequences for students who were retained in earlier grades. Very often the student’s original difficulties persist, or more likely worsen, as their school career progresses.

Winning the Battle and Losing the War, Jimerson, Anderson, and Whipple (Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 39(4), 2002)

Considering the results of this review of research examining the association between grade retention and high school dropout and other reviews of research addressing the efficacy of grade retention (Holmes, 1989; Jimerson, 2001a, 2001b; Smith & Shepard, 1987, 1988), we must move beyond the use of grade retention as an intervention strategy and attempt to implement those strategies research has demonstrated to be effective (Jimerson, 2001a). Educational professionals, researchers, parents, and policymakers would be remiss to overlook the implications of research that demonstrate the association between grade retention and school dropout. Furthermore, a new imperative has emerged, where the onus is on programs training future educational professionals to disseminate the results of the recent research presented in this review. It is crucial that we transcend limited solutions and begin to consider student developmental and achievement trajectories in order to reinforce and strengthen pathways that promote social and cognitive competence and lead to academic success.

Does Retention (Repeating a Grade) Help Struggling Learners?

Some stakeholders in Florida believe that the “hard line in the sand” created by mandatory, test-based retention created a motivational difference in teachers and parents…, since it is thought that many of the same learning supports were being provided to struggling students prior to the policy. This may be the case for test score gains close to the retention year, but given the well-known longer-term negative effect of retention on drop-out rates (e.g., Allensworth, 2005) as well as the assured delayed entry into the workforce, Florida’s evidence falls far short of even suggesting that retention is the only or best way to motivate a real positive difference for struggling students, nor has it contradicted the overwhelming evidence against retention prior and since.

What Doesn’t Work, Smith and Shepard (Phi Delta Kappan, October 1987)

The Lesson of the Cupcakes: Fixing Schools by Resisting Gimmicks and Heeding Evidence, Kevin Welner

Exploring the Association Between Grade Retention and Dropout, Jimerson, et al. (The California School Psychologist, Vol. 7, pp. 51-62, 2002)

Ultimately, the research is unequivocal in identifying that grade retention does not appear to address the needs of these students at risk of academic failure. Findings from this study should not be misinterpreted as an indication that retention was an effective intervention strategy for the retained students who did not drop out of high school. There is a need for further research comparing the retained students who completed high school with matched comparison groups of similarly low achieving but socially promoted students. This study highlights the association of early socio-emotional and behavioral adjustment and high school dropout among a group of retained students. These findings have direct implications for school psychologists and other educational professionals. In particular, rather than focusing on the unsupported academic intervention of grade retention, it is time to implement prevention and intervention programs that have been empirically demonstrated to meet the needs of these students in facilitating both positive academic success and socio-emotional adjustment.

Grade Retention: A Flawed Education Strategy, Xia and Glennia (part 1)

Decades of research suggest that grade retention does not work as a panacea for poor student performance. The majority of research fails to find compelling evidence that retention improves long-term student achievement. An overwhelmingly large body of studies have consistently demonstrated negative academic effects of retention. Contrary to popular belief, researchers have almost unanimously found that early retention during kindergarten to grade three is harmful, both academically and emotionally. [1] Many studies find that retention does not necessarily lead to increased work effort among students as predicted.

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Grade Retention, Xia and Glennia (part 2)

Grade Retention: The Gap Between Research and Practice, Xia and Glennia (part 3)

The majority of published studies and decades of research indicate that there is usually little to be gained, and much harm that may be done through retaining students in grade. Yet, many educators continue to use retention as a way to improve student achievement and claim that it produces positive results. The consequence is while a growing body of studies show that retention does not improve academic performance and has a number of negative side effects, more and more states and school districts have adopted retention policy in an effort to enhance the educational accountability.

Synthesis of Research on Grade Retention, Shepard and Smith (Educational Leadership, May 1990)

Grade Retention [a synthesis]

Social Promotion – In Comparison to Grade Retention, Advantages and Disadvantages, Different Perspectives, Jere Brophy

Meta-analysis of Grade Retention Research: Implications for Practice in the 21st Century, Shane R. Jimerson (School Psychology Review, 2001, Volume 30, No. 3, pp. 420-437)

A Synthesis of Grade Retention Research: Looking Backward and Moving Forward, Shane R. Jimerson (The California School Psychologist, Vol. 6, pp. 47-59, 2001)

In looking backwards at the retention research and previous reviews and meta-analyses, a consistent theme emerges—grade retention is not an empirically supported intervention. As reflected in the results of the three meta-analyses described above, the confluence of results from research during the past century fails to demonstrate achievement, socioemotional, or behavioral advantages of retaining students. Moreover, the research consistently demonstrates that students who are retained are more likely to drop out of high school.

Evaluating Kindergarten Retention Policy, Hong and Raudenbush (September 2006)

First, Do No Harm, Jay P. Heubert (Educational Leadership, December 2002/January 2003)

The Facts on Education: Should Students Be Allowed to Fail Grades?

[1] See Krashen, S. (2013, May). Need Children Read ‘Proficiently’ by Grade Three? Language Magazine; Deborah A. Byrnes, and Kaoru Yamamoto, 1985, “Academic Retention of Elementary Pupils: An Inside Look,” Education, 106(2), 208-14; Peg Dawson, 1998, “A Primer on Student Grade Retention: What the Research Says,” NASP Communique, 26(8); Shane R. Jimerson et al., 1997, “A Prospective, Longitudinal Study of the Correlates and Consequences of Early Grade Retention,” Journal of School Psychology, 35(1), 3-25; Panayota Y. Mantzicopoulos, 1997, “Do Certain Groups of Children Profit from Early Retention? A Follow-Up Study of Kindergartners with Attention Problems,” Psychology in the Schools, 34(2), 115-27; Samuel J. Meisels and Fong-Ruey Liaw, 1993, “Failure in Grade: Do Retained Students Catch Up?” Journal of Educational Research, 87(2), 69-77; Judy Temple, Arthur Reynolds and Suh-Ruu Ou, 2001, “Grade Retention and School Dropout: Another Look at the Evidence,” The CEIC Review, 10(5), 5-6 & 21; Charles L. Thompson and Elizabeth K. Cunningham, 2000, “Retention and Social Promotion: Research and Implications for Policy,” Eric Clearinghouse on Urban Education Digest, 161, 1-5; Deneen M. Walters and Sherry B. Borgers, 1995, “Student Retention: Is It Effective?” School Counselor, 42(4).