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Terry Grier once met a student at a Darlington County, S.C., middle school who looked much older than the eighth-graders in his class. When Grier, an experienced school district superintendent, asked the boy whether he was in the right place, the student smiled and said, “Yes, sir. This is the third year in a row that I have been in Ms. Jones’s class.”

Grier told me he recoiled at that, but he wasn’t surprised. Making low-performing students repeat grades is old-fashioned and controversial — but enshrined in many state laws. When President Bill Clinton in 1997 pushed for an end to what he called “social promotion” of students who failed to pass state standards, particularly in reading, only about six states required such exams. Now at least half of states do.

Most of the educators I know don’t like grade retention — the term of art for holding a student back. They prefer to help students improve without squashing their dreams and keeping them in place while their friends move forward. But they face new battles, because recent studies show making kids repeat grades can improve their future performance.

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A 2017 study of third-graders retained in Florida for low scores found if they were given better instruction, they did better in eighth-grade math and 10th-grade reading than students who were not held back. They also hit better grade point averages in high school and took fewer remedial courses.

In October, RAND Corporation researchers Umut Ozek and Louis T. Mariano revealed that studies in Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Chicago and New York City “provide evidence that grade retention in elementary school (generally grades 3-5), when implemented as part of a broader remediation effort, can increase test scores through middle school and reduce the need for future remediation.”

Such research has yet to persuade the many opponents of grade retention that there aren’t better ways to help children overcome academic weaknesses. Daniel Domenech, an experienced superintendent who led the School Superintendents Association, said holding students back was done in all the districts he served “primarily because of the lack of an alternative.” He said “if students were taught at the level that they are at and allowed to progress as they achieve mastery, there would be no need to retain them.”

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The failure to arrange such progress for each child reflects “inadequacies in early childhood opportunities and in teacher education,” said former Montgomery County schools superintendent Jerry Weast.

Researchers who see good results from retention say it can work if done in grades three, four or five. Harvard scholar Martin West, one of the researchers on the 2017 study of Florida’s retention policy, said that state did “a reasonable job of this.”

“They asked retained students to attend summer reading camps, prescribed individualized plans to support their development as readers, and generally made big investments in improving reading instruction in the early grades,” he said.

West said opponents of grade retention are correct when they say being retained is a painful experience for many students. “My question would be whether they’re confident that the students wouldn’t have had an equally painful experience if they were advanced to the next grade and consistently faced content for which they were unprepared,” he said. “If retention is disabling for most students, then studies like ours would find large negative effects in both the short and long term. That’s not what we see.”

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Ozek said “we view retention as a last resort for such cases, and we emphasize intervening at the first signs the student is at risk to maximize avoiding the need to go the retention route.”

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Ozek mentioned a 2020 study of Florida schools he did with University of Rochester scholar David Figlio found that “students who scored right below the retention cutoff, and hence were flagged for retention, were 10 percent less likely to take a remedial course in English language arts (ELA), 25 percent more likely to take an advanced course in ELA, 25 percent more likely to take an advanced course in math, and 20 percent more likely to take an advanced course in science in middle school” compared with similar students who scored right above the retention cutoff and didn’t have to repeat a grade.

The data from Florida, which appears to provide the most detailed information on retention, indicates that about 10 percent of 213,192 third-graders were retained in the 2021-22 school year. Another 15 percent were promoted to fourth grade despite poor scores on the state achievement tests because they showed other signs of reading proficiency, were immigrants still learning English or had disabilities that exempted them from retention.

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The number of states using tests to determine retention has increased, but it is not clear whether more students are being retained now than when Clinton complained about the practice.

West said one federal report suggests that the percentage of students retained each year declined between 1996 and 2020. “One possibility is that the percentage of students who were retained specifically for academic reasons did increase over this time period,” he said, “at least in states with test-based promotion policies, while the percentage retained for other reasons, such as behavioral or social-emotional reasons, went down.”

Ozek said “another possibility is that the increasing popularity of early grade retentions reduced the need for retentions in later grades.”

The day after Grier encountered the South Carolina student who had repeated eighth grade twice, he moved the boy to a high school. The student was enrolled in choral music and English I, which he passed with help from a tutor.

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He enrolled in summer school to continue catching up, but Grier left the district that summer and lost track of the student. One of the problems with retention is the failure to keep track of what happens to students in many states after they repeat a grade.

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