Think Again
Is Grade Retention Bad for Kids?
Published in: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute website (October 2023)
Posted on RAND.org on October 23, 2023
For many years, the conventional wisdom in the field was that grade retention was a bad idea. A 1997 opinion piece in Education Week titled “Grade retention doesn’t work” reflected the prevailing sentiment in the education community and the available research evidence at that time: retained students performed worse than their promoted peers in the years that followed. This brief challenges that notion, based on more recent studies that do a better job of isolating the causal effect of retention.
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