Should Retention Be Used to Hold Students Accountable?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the complex question of whether grade retention is an appropriate accountability tool.
Key Takeaways
- Retention is a blunt instrument - Holding a student back has significant social and emotional costs that must be weighed
- But social promotion isn't the answer either - Passing students who haven't learned creates compounding problems
- The real answer is intervention - Intensive, early intervention is far more effective than either retention or promotion for unprepared students
Transcript
retention.
Should students be retained in their grade level and not advanced on to the next grade if they don't meet certain academic standards?
This idea of holding kids back if they don't learn what they're supposed to has been around for a long time, and it's still very popular with some people, but I'm not sure I really see why.
I'm not sure I really see the value of retention, except in very specific circumstances.
There is a scale called Light's Retention Scale that elementary schools have used for probably generations now to decide if a particular student is a good candidate for retention.
And if the student is very young, if the student is physically small, if the student is academically not where they need to be, then retention can essentially be a way of making up for what should have been a red-shirting decision, right?
A decision to start a student in kindergarten a year later.
But the older the student gets, the worse the prospects for retention are on Light's retention scale, right?
If you have a middle schooler or a high schooler, there's almost no way they're going to come out with a recommendation to retain on Light's retention scale.
And we also want to make sure that we're not just retaining kids who actually need special education services or something else.
So are there cases where retention might be a good possibility?
Yes, but I think most of the time, retention would just make a student older than their peers it would just separate them from the peers that they've been going to school with up to that point and i think there's an argument that if we have high standards we can get more out of kids right that if we if we hold their feet to the fire and say you don't get to go into the next grade unless you do your work and you learn up to this standard that particular argument does not seem compelling to me let me know what you think about that part Personally, I'm not sure this rationale of using promotion as something to hold over kids' heads really works, really gets more out of them.
Is it really an incentive to say, we're going to hold you back for a kid who's already at risk of dropping out?
Now, do I think you should graduate if you haven't done the work, haven't passed, haven't learned what you need to learn?
I think not.
I think it is valid to say to graduate, you need to meet certain academic standards because we want to avoid being in the scandalous position of graduating students who say can't read.
Beyond that, though, I'm not sure that we actually help students learn more or get more work out of them.
by holding promotion over their heads, by saying we're going to hold you back if you don't do your work.
Like, I'm not really sure that works.
So let me know what you think.
Should we use promotion as an incentive?
Should we say you're going to get held back if you don't learn what you're supposed to learn?
Let me know what you think.