Third grade retention policies could lead to better student scores, even before any children are held back, a new study suggests.
The findings, from researchers at American University and Syracuse University, add another wrinkle to an ongoing debate over retention policies tied to reading scores, which require students who aren’t proficient readers by the end of 3rd grade to repeat the year.
Eighteen states currently have retention policies on the books, some part of recently passed “science of reading” laws, according to a tracker maintained by the advocacy group ExcelinEd.
Critics of these retention policies argue that holding kids back can have negative social-emotional consequences, and doesn’t always lead to better outcomes for children who are retained.
But its proponents say that the benefits outweigh the potential harms, in large part due to the way retention policies can prompt schools to beef up their support systems for struggling students.
Testing the retention hypothesis
The new working paper, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, tests that hypothesis in Ohio, which adopted a retention policy that went into effect during the 2013-14 school year. Researchers analyzed the test scores of more than 500,000 students who entered 3rd grade between 2014-2017.
They found that 3rd graders who were identified as at-risk for retention did better on end-of-year reading and math tests than students who started the year with similar reading abilities, but weren’t identified as at-risk for retention.
The difference in test scores was “notable, but not huge,” said Sarah Souders, the lead author on the paper, and an assistant professor of public administration and policy at American University: 0.077 of a standard deviation in reading and 0.037 of a standard deviation in math. Positive reading effects persisted, though diminished somewhat, through 7th grade.
The findings provide evidence that the group of students affected by retention policies is much broader than the small number of children who are actually retained each year, Souders said.
Gains might stem from interventions, accountability measures
To compare groups of students, the researchers exploited a feature of Ohio’s law.
Third graders take the state test that they’ll need to pass to advance to 4th grade twice, once in the fall and once in the spring. Students who pass the test in the fall are guaranteed to move on to 4th grade the next year. Students who don’t pass it at the beginning of the year spend the rest of the year under the threat of retention—they must pass the test in the spring to progress to 4th grade.
The paper compares students who just cleared the threshold to pass the test with students who just missed it, using what’s called a regression discontinuity design. Those two groups of students started 3rd grade with almost identical reading abilities, and were demographically similar, and differed only by being on the other side of the retention cutoff.
The group of 3rd graders that were eligible for retention outperformed the other group at the end of 3rd grade in both math and reading, and for several years in reading after that. They were also less likely to be absent. The two groups didn’t have significant differences in reported disciplinary issues.
The paper offers a few potential explanations for what caused these improved outcomes for students under threat of retention.
Ohio’s law didn’t just require retention for students who didn’t meet the proficiency threshold, it also mandated that schools periodically monitor students’ progress and intervene to support kids who were struggling throughout grades K-3. The law also tied school and district report cards, and some funding, to 3rd grade reading proficiency.
Third graders who were eligible for retention were more likely to be assigned to reading intervention than their peers just above the cut-off, which suggests that instructional support could be driving some of the score gains, the researchers write.
But it doesn’t explain everything, they say. Retention-eligible students made the most progress over their peers in districts that had higher spending levels and in districts where there were larger percentages of students at-risk of retention. But those districts didn’t deploy reading interventions as widely as some others, suggesting there are other factors at play, too.
The results, said Souders, “tell us that there is some attention shifting that’s happening.”
In those schools with more students at-risk, it’s possible that leaders made more schoolwide changes aimed at improving reading outcomes, like swapping out curriculum choices or instructional strategies, she said. Still, she added, the study can’t point to any conclusive factors.
Study contributes to growing body of research on ‘threat’ of retention
This Ohio study isn’t the first to show that the prospect of retention alone can affect student achievement.
Research last year from the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania found similar effects in Michigan, analyzing the state’s 3rd grade retention policy between 2020-2022. (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, signed a bill to repeal the policy in 2023.)
Third graders who scored just below the cutoff for retention had better reading scores later on than their peers who scored just above the cutoff, even when districts didn’t actually retain any students. The researchers attributed the gains to the extra reading support that was unlocked when students were flagged for retention.
Taken together, these two studies raise questions about how retention policies change behaviors across the school system—for educators, but also for parents and students, said Gema Zamarro, a professor in education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas, who was not involved with either study.
The aftermath of the pandemic has demonstrated how parents rely more on grades than test scores as indicators of their children’s academic progress, Zamarro said. It’s possible that retention policies prompt schools and districts to offer clearer information about test scores’ meaning and consequences.
“There are more [instructional] supports, but parents also get the message: My kids need to improve,” she said.
This is still an area where more research is needed, though, Zamarro added. Retention’s critics cite the social-emotional consequences of holding students back, but there isn’t as much research about how the threat of retention alone could influence the same factors.
In the Ohio study, the lack of differences in discipline suggests that the common, negative effects of grade retention likely didn’t show up to any great degree, Zamarro said. Still, she said, “we would need more survey data to understand this.”
