Retaining students has implications for the attendance and academic performance of their nonretained classmates, finds a new study of California students.
For the report, author Michael Gottfried, an assistant professor in urban education at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, examined data for elementary children in an unnamed California district.
He found that students in classrooms with a higher percentage of retained children also had more unexcused—but not excused—absences during the school year. Because studies have linked unexcused absences to academic disengagement, Mr. Gottfried suggests that retained students may have a negative effect on their classmates’ learning.
