Grade Retention:
Should my child repeat a grade?
NASP Recommends Intensive Intervention
NASP urges educators to use methods other than grade retention and social promotion…. When retained and promoted peers are compared in the same grade, retained students experience a short-term boost that dissipates within 4 years…. Except in very rare circumstances when a student has missed a large number of school days, grade retention and social promotion are not recommended. Instead, students whose performance is substantially below their grade-level peers need an intensive individualized intervention plan with frequent progress monitoring and involvement with specialists and related services providers….
The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) advises against holding a student back to repeat a grade (i.e., grade retention), advocating instead for intensive, individualized intervention (see Position Statement excerpted above).
If your child’s academic performance is substantially below grade level,
- I recommend reading my brief article on requesting a Special Education evaluation. It is important to consider whether your child might have a learning disability.
- I also recommend seeking the services of a mental health provider to consider other barriers, such as inattention, anxiety, or depression, that might be interfering with your child’s progress.
Significant Risks with Few, if Any, Benefits
Researchers have attempted to assess the effects of grade retention on achievement for more than three decades…. The unanimous conclusion from these reviews is that grade retention offers few if any benefits to the retained student and may increase the retained child’s risk for poor school outcomes, including dropping out of school prior to high school graduation.
The NASP warns that grade retention carries significant risks with few, if any, potential benefits (see White Paper excerpted above). Broadly, a few important questions include:
- Instructional Efficacy: How will simply repeating the same instruction produce different results?
- Developmental Cost: How does the rationale for retention weigh against the developmental impact of delaying—or effectively losing—an entire year?
- Long-Term Ripple Effects: What are the social and overall consequences of being out of sync with age-based peers for major life stages? Consider milestones, such as puberty, dating, driving, graduation, and the transition to adulthood (e.g., college or a vocation).
Guidance Reaffirmed Post-Pandemic
The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) opposes the use of retention as an intervention strategy to mitigate instructional loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it urges caution regarding the assumption that special education services are an appropriate way to address COVID-19 instructional loss.…Retention is a costly intervention with little to no evidence of improving long-term academic outcomes. The majority of studies conducted over the past four decades on the effectiveness of grade retention fail to support its efficacy in remediating academic deficits (e.g., Andrew, 2014; Fruehwirth et al., 2016; Hwang & Cappella, 2019; Jimerson, 2001). In fact, repeating a grade prior to beginning high school increases the risk that a student will drop out even when other variables, including overall academic achievement and disciplinary records, are considered (Hughes et al., 2018; Jacob & Lefgren, 2009; Stearns et al., 2016). Moreover, retained students from minoritized backgrounds drop out at disproportionately higher rates compared with their White peers (Hughes et al., 2018).
The NASP also specifically evaluated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and reaffirmed its guidance against grade retention.