Why early-grade retention policies can help students who aren’t held back

Making a struggling student repeat a grade is one of the most fraught and debated practices in American education. Some promote retention as key to improving early reading, while others castigate it as unfair and ineffective.

Now two new studies, one in Indiana and another in Ohio, find an underappreciated benefit of retention rules: motivating schools and students to improve, even those who are not ultimately held back. This research suggests there’s value to informing families when students are not on track and setting a clear benchmark for moving students onto the next grade. Importantly, this does not seem to require holding back a large swath of students.

In Indiana, researcher Marcus Winters studied a state-level policy that required students to pass a third-grade reading test to move on to fourth grade. First, he looked at students who fell just short of passing in second grade. Over the next year, those students made more academic growth than similar students who’d just passed the test.

“Getting this information early has an effect that shows up later,” says Winters, a professor at Boston University.

Then he examined a different group: students who barely failed the reading exam in March of third grade. They still had one more chance to pass, but the risk of being held back was real. Parents and teachers were notified of this. When those students took a different state test just a month or so later, their reading scores ticked up more than expected, the study found. 

In a separate study, researchers Sarah Souders and Robert Bifulco examined a similar policy in Ohio. There, students took a reading test in the fall of third grade. Again, the study tracked students who just failed, and thus risked being held back, versus those who just passed. Over the course of that year, the at-risk students’ reading scores rose faster. Some of those gains even persisted into future grades, suggesting they reflected real improvements in learning, not exam cramming.

In both Indiana and Ohio, math scores rose slightly too among students facing retention. This is a common finding in early-reading studies, though researchers aren’t quite sure why. One theory is that better reading skills improve students’ ability to solve word problems on math tests.

The upshot from both studies is the same: The possibility that a student will be held back seems to jump-start learning. The improvements were meaningful in both studies, though not massive. It’s not clear what precisely drove these gains. Perhaps students worked harder in class and parents spent extra time helping them read at home. Maybe schools pulled at-risk students aside for extra help (and in fact the Ohio researchers found this happened).

“The threat of retention is enough to produce significant gains,” writes Ohio State University professor Vladimir Kogan. “Since many more students face such a threat than ultimately end up getting retained, this means that many more students benefit from retention mandates than previously thought.”

There’s one more wrinkle from this research worth keeping in mind: In Indiana, the policy changed midstream. In 2017, it became easier for students to move on to the next grade as schools were given much more leeway to promote students who failed the reading test. The retention “threat” became less severe, in other words. 

Yet this shift did not dilute the benefits of the policy, at least in the years Winters studied. Even when the chances of being held back went down, students still made improvements when they failed the retention test, Winters found. Perhaps families and schools benefited from simply knowing students were off track. Or maybe even the remote possibility of retention was motivating.

Holding young children back a grade is controversial — and for good reasons. Students who repeat a year make large test score gains, but it’s not at all clear this helps them in the long run. Parents often don’t want their kids held back. The possibility of retention causes “anxiety across the board,” a third-grade teacher in Ohio told a local news outlet. “It’s just sad to see so much pressure put on a little child about one test when it doesn’t need to be that way.” 

These competing concerns help explain why state policies have often yo-yo’d around. In 2023, Ohio made its retention policy more lenient, while the next year Indiana officials once again made theirs stricter.

The pressure from retention on schools, students, and families is real and surely unpleasant in many cases. But the new research suggests this pressure may be precisely what causes retention policies to boost test scores. The question for policymakers is whether that’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

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