, circulated as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, focuses on a Florida policy that has to boost achievement among young learners. In so doing, it adds a new wrinkle to an evidence base that has not only expanded substantially over the last few years, but also : grade retention, at least for low-scoring children in early grades, meaningfully improves their test scores. 

How that improvement is accomplished is still up for debate. While some believe schools foster the learning gains through extra instruction, others point to the simple advantages of children studying the same material after undergoing a year of cognitive and social development. And the latest results — referred to as “spillover effects” on younger brothers and sisters — raise further questions as to how retention works.

Umut Özek, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and co-author of the latest Florida paper, said that while the academic growth he measured was likely attributable to multiple causes, families and educators could be motivated by the “threat effect” of students being flagged to repeat a grade.

“When you have this goal set in third grade, such that you need to score above a certain level to be promoted, it provides a clear signal to schools and parents that they need to do something in earlier grades so their students aren’t retained,” he remarked.

However promising the research outcomes, grade retention remains one of the most contentious planks of the education reform agenda. Since 2013, over two dozen states either allowing or requiring school districts to make grade promotion decisions based on elementary reading performance. But parents have with the policy, with some of third-grade reading exams. Legislators in and significantly relaxed their elementary reading mandates earlier this year. In Tennessee, which adopted its own retention policy in 2021, 60 percent of third graders this spring, and in an effort to demonstrate proficiency.

In the wake of generational learning loss stemming from COVID-related school closures, some experts to gradually affect larger numbers of K–12 students. Katharine Strunk, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said that the prospect of seeing their children fall short of promotion was having an “eye-opening effect” on many families.

“One thing that’s come out of the pandemic is that we know that parents are not always made aware of the challenges facing their kids at school,” Strunk said. “Maybe for the first time, parents are being told, ‘Your kid is really struggling in a way that’s much worse than his or her peers.’”

A ‘very clear signal’ for parents

Florida’s reading retention law, first enacted in 2002 under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, to score above the minimum achievement level on a literacy exam in order to move onto the third grade — though “good-cause” exemptions are often granted to children who receive special education or English learner services, who have already been held back, or who can demonstrate reading proficiency via other means. Due in part to energetic lobbying from Bush and his think tank, ExcelinEd, a slew of other states over the last decade.

To reveal the impact of the original policy, Ozek and his collaborators gathered a comprehensive set of student-level data from 12 anonymous school districts, including standardized test scores, special education status, demographic indicators and teacher characteristics. That information was combined with birth records from the same areas, allowing the researchers to link the progress of older students targeted for retention with that of their closest younger siblings. 

The paper encompasses the first seven years of the state’s grade retention system and subsequent test scores for both older and younger siblings through 2011–12; during that period, Florida’s portion of third graders retained was approximately 10 percent, though the annual rate declined from 15 percent in 2002 to just 6 percent in 2010.

Comparing kids who placed below the retention cutoff score against those who placed above it, the team found that repeating the third grade was associated with a statistically significant increase in state test scores in both reading and math. That finding largely echoes into retention in Florida, including co-authored by Ozek. 

To account for the growth, Ozek cited the breadth of resources that schools are required to provide children who are not promoted. Such students are assigned to highly effective teachers, receive 90 minutes of dedicated reading instruction each day and are given the option of attending an intensive, literacy-oriented summer camp.

“These students receive substantial support in the following year, and that support is more personalized and tailored toward their needs,” Ozek said. “That’s probably a key element behind the success of some of these policies.”

That observation echoes the conclusions of by a pair of researchers at Michigan State University. Their analysis, which examined the effects of early literacy policies on both state test scores and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that achievement growth was greatest in — including some form of retention, but also extensive assistance for affected students and coaching for their teachers.

“Altogether, these results indicate that the full set of interventions available under early literacy policies is important in improving literacy achievement and skills,” the authors wrote. (Strunk, until recently an education professor at Michigan State, helped review the paper.)

Beyond the direct improvements, however, Ozek’s Florida paper finds that retained students’ younger siblings also saw a bump in test scores compared with the brothers and sisters of children who were promoted to the fourth grade. That advancement was measured at approximately 30 percent the size of the main effects; it was also particularly concentrated among boys, as well as immigrant families and those including a disabled child. 

The authors offer several theories to explain why younger siblings experienced positive, albeit smaller, movement. Among them: Having an older sibling held back was correlated with being assigned to a classroom with relatively higher-performing peers, perhaps because parents of retained third-graders influenced the classroom placements of their younger children. 

Additionally, in instances where retained students attended schools that received a state accountability score lower than an A over the preceding two years, their parents were more likely to move younger siblings to schools with better reading results, higher-performing teachers (as measured by value-added scores on state tests) and those specializing in reading instruction. 

Ozek said he could understand why having a child repeat a grade would seize parents’ attention. A father of two, he noted that retention was a much starker message than performance on state tests, and one that would likely cause adults to take notice.

“It’s really hard for me, even as an education policy researcher, to assess what those [state test] scores mean,” he said. “But when you get a signal that says, ‘Your kid is not performing at a level that will allow them to be promoted to fourth grade,’ that’s a very clear signal that will likely induce a response from parents, and schools as well.”

The harms of being held back

Little outside evidence exists to either validate or undermine the new study’s claims around spillover effects on younger family members. But competing explanations have recently cast doubt on the fairness and effectiveness of retention in early grades. 

Mississippi’s third-grade “reading gate,” which largely resembles Florida’s law, has been nationally lauded for pushing up historically dismal literacy scores over the last decade. At the same time, argue that is due to a form of statistical sleight of hand; since a healthy portion of the state’s fourth-graders have been held back, their additional year of intellectual maturity — not the effects of retention and supplemental instruction — could be responsible for their progress. (Advocates have responded that while that claim may be applicable elsewhere, it is , where the “reading gate” appears not to have increased the average age of fourth graders.)

Meanwhile, studies of students retained in higher grades have found that being held back in middle or high school makes students and significantly more likely to be . While younger children are seemingly less fazed by repeating a year, the practice may be salient, and damaging, with transitions to middle and high school.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Strunk, who has of Michigan’s now-weakened retention system, agreed that students who repeated third grade had “more opportunity to develop and learn,” theoretically allowing them to achieve at higher levels on that basis alone. Beyond that possibility, she added, there is something of a paradox in sending low-achieving students back to the same classrooms and teachers that failed them the first time around.

“Is it really a good idea to give kids an extra year of school if the schooling is not working the way we want it to?” Strunk wondered. “It’s like the Einstein quote: ‘The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’”

Leaving aside the precise causes of post-retention growth, however, the bulk of the recent research suggests that retaining floundering readers can produce notable short- and medium-term gains. Another of a Florida-style literacy standard, focused on schools in Indiana, showed that third graders who scored just below the threshold for promotion ended up significantly out-performing their classmates who were narrowly promoted. Those effects extended into the middle school grades, with no sign that retention increased disciplinary or attendance problems.   

Cory Koedel, a co-author of that study and an economics professor at the University of Missouri, said he was agnostic about which explanation for the progress mattered most, or even whether the effects would eventually fade out.

“In my view, whether it’s the extra year of instruction or the extra year of maturity that’s allowing them to catch up isn’t that important. What’s important is that they’re catching up.” 

But bowing to uncertainty sparked by the pandemic, officials will allow one-year changes to the criteria states use to identify those schools. That means the report cards states use to communicate student performance to the public could look quite different.

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To help measure COVID-19’s impact, states might also choose to rate schools on how much instructional time students lost or break out chronic absenteeism by whether students were attending school in person or remotely. The department will collect comments on the 31-page document until Jan. 17.

“This gives a clear signal to the field and to the states that we are restarting accountability,” said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign. “This data needs to be reported to families and the community.”

The nonprofit is among the organizations that have been calling for more statewide data on student performance during the pandemic — even though standardized tests were canceled in 2019-20 and several states saw low turnout for testing last school year. Others say the department, by allowing such a vast array of changes, could leave parents and the public more in the dark about how well schools have performed.

The department is recommending that states and districts update improvement plans to focus on the pandemic’s effects on the most vulnerable students. States can also give those schools more time to improve by not counting the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, and can change the achievement targets they need to hit to be removed from the state’s lowest-performing list.

“Uncle Sam is saying that not only is it okay to move the goalposts, states can install new goalposts if they want to, too,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute who helped implement Indiana’s accountability system.

In addition to the temporary changes, the document encourages states to consider long-term additions, such as adding new indicators of student success that could endure beyond 2022.

‘Behind-the-scenes tinkering’

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, states must test students in reading, math and science and publicly identify their lowest-performing Title I schools and those where groups of students, such as English learners or students with disabilities, consistently underperform. Those schools, which receive extra funds to help students make progress, have up to four years to show improvement or face additional state intervention.

Maria Cammack, deputy superintendent of assessment, accountability, data systems and research at the Oklahoma State Department of Education, said state officials aren’t talking about adding new measures of school quality for one year, but want to be as transparent as possible about data elements that can supplement its high-stakes accountability system.

“Everybody wants to understand unfinished learning,” she said, adding that it can take a while for districts to report and interpret new information. “Any changes enacted for a single year breaks our ability to monitor change in performance in a time where we need to understand it most deeply.”

Bibb Hubbard, president of the nonprofit Learning Heroes, said she appreciated the department’s expectation that states include families in making decisions about changes to accountability. Parents, she said, rely on state report cards to understand their children’s progress in school and “want the truth, even if it isn’t good news.” States, she added, should research which measures parents find most meaningful.

Chu added that it could be hard for the public to keep up with “all of the behind-the-scenes tinkering.”

“If states add, modify [or] remove a bunch of indicators from their state report cards,” he said, “it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get an honest accounting of how schools and students have fared.”

A key question for state leaders has been how to calculate whether schools have improved over the past few years in the absence of consecutive years of assessment data. Most states consider test score trends over multiple years as part of their accountability systems.

The guidance suggests states could replace the growth measure with a different indicator — like achievement gaps — but experts say such a change could significantly alter which schools are identified for improvement.

Growth is currently “by far the best” measure for differentiating between schools, said Cory Koedel, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Missouri–Columbia and an expert on growth measures. “I can’t even name what a plausible back-up plan would be,” he said.

Chris Janzer, the assistant director of accountability at the Michigan Department of Education, added that there’s no guarantee state testing will run smoothly this year.

“We don’t know what test participation is going to look like this coming spring, especially with Omicron raging now,” he said. “Will we have another wave in the spring that causes more school disruptions?”

For 2021 testing, the department waived the requirement that states assess 95 percent of their students. But if schools fall short of that percentage in 2022, it’s possible they would be identified as low-performing based on participation rates alone, said Janzer, whose state saw 70 percent participation last year.

Oklahoma had an overall participation rate of over 90 percent last spring, Cammack said, but in some districts, only about 30 percent of students took state tests, despite an assessment window that was three weeks longer than normal and included extended hours and Saturday sessions.

‘Meet the moment’

Stanford University scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, who serves as president of the California State Board of Education, acknowledged that 2022 probably won’t be a “neat and tidy year” in the realm of testing and accountability.

But she is among those who see the guidance as a way to “lay a path toward reauthorization” of ESSA. The department, she said, is sending the message that accountability is important, but that states should also “meet the moment” and consider changes that allow more room for other measures of student achievement and school performance.

Bell-Ellwanger, with the Data Quality Campaign, said the guidance presents an opportunity to add criteria that some say is lacking from many state report cards — such as more data on what students do after high school.

In December, her organization and Chiefs for Change, a network of district leaders, issued a report arguing that K-12 leaders could better prepare students for college and the workplace if data on college enrollment, jobs and other postsecondary trends were more accessible.

“As states signal that they are moving forward with recovery,” she said, “understanding college and career pathways and the economic mobility of students is important.”

The department’s guidance notes that states could also consider adding “opportunity to learn” standards — such as the extent to which students have access to qualified educators and a high-quality curriculum. A recent report from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, highlighted growing efforts to rate schools on questions of equity, which could range from whether students have access to advanced courses or even if schools have Black and Hispanic mental health providers on staff.

But the report noted that some measures might not be statistically valid and reliable enough for an accountability system that determines consequences for schools.

“They need to be predictive,” said Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd and co-author of the report. “They need to confidently signal how students are likely to perform in school and beyond.”

But he added that just reporting data on some of those goals is still useful for the public even if they aren’t used to identify schools for accountability. The department’s guidance takes this “cautious stance,” he said. “Transparency has the power to focus educators’ and others’ efforts, even when they don’t face direct consequences for the information that’s collected.”