Hold 'em........back?

Jay Greene is one of the big talking heads in education; I've discussed his work here before on merit pay and his most recent work regarding how schools are named. He's now turned his eye to retention policies, with a non-typical result:

Students retained for a year under Florida’s test-based promotion policy slightly outperformed students with similar test scores who were promoted to the next grade in previous years, according to a study published in the September issue of Education Finance and Policy.

That finding contradicts previous research, which has suggested that holding students back for a year can have harmful academic and social effects. The study’s authors, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters from the University of Arkansas, attribute the difference to the use of an objective promotion policy, rather than a subjective one based on teachers’ and administrators’ recommendations.

The study also found that students who were retained continued to make achievement gains in subsequent years. The researchers studied data from 2002 to 2005 from the Florida Department of Education on public school students in grades 3-10. The state’s promotion policy was started in 2002.

You can find the entire study at the Journal of Education Finance and Policy here.

I can't really judge without reading the entire report, but one wonders if a slight increase is worth the money that it costs to educate the child for another year. The last piece I bolded, about the retained kids continuing to make progress from year to year, also could be a bit misleading--are they progressing at the same rate as the other kids in their peer group, the kids in their class, or their grade as a whole?

Read more here, if any.

You Flunk: The Hardest Decision I Have to Make

A recent article in The Olympian talked about when it might be a good idea for a child to repeat a grade. It's a very fair article, and one that could be shared with parents should the topic ever come up.

We've done a lot of research on retention here at my school this year, mainly because we didn't have a coherent policy school-wide for staff to follow. In the upper grades it was mainly a threat--"If you don't start doing the work, you'll repeat the grade!"--which, while satisfying, never really seems to work all that well. For the younger grades we can easily identify the kids who are struggling, but it doesn't make the decision any easier.

Take C, who I had two years ago. He's easily one of my favorite students ever, but it was apparent from the minute he walked in the door that he was going to have problems. Every other kid could identify all the letters of the alphabet; he knew 13. Most of the other kids had the letter/sound correlation down pat; C could tell me the sounds of the letters in his name, plus S and T, and that was about it. When the Title teachers tested the 1st graders he came in last out of 103 kids. In talking to his mom it sounded like his Kindergarten was completely non-academic, which may have made for a pack of happy kids but is lousy for the 1st grade teachers.

I worked my ass off for C. Twice a week he'd stay with me after school so we could work together on the literacy skills he was missing. We had a great relationship and the growth he made was phenomenal!

And at the end of the year, he was still failing in every subject. I laid it all out for his parents--the struggles he had, the even worse struggles he was sure to have if he did go on, and after some tears (on both sides, I'll admit) we decided that he'd repeat the grade and I'd keep him.

His redshirt season in 1st grade went really well. He tested out of Title, and was right there for most of the year. I though it'd worked. In 2nd grade, things fell apart. He started the year with a teacher who was new to the grade (she'd taught middle school the year before), and then when she up and retired in December he had a brand new teacher struggling to get ahold of a tough, tough class. Complete and total regression followed.

In 3rd grade they had him tested, and now he's on an IEP.

Undeniably, retention didn't work. A year of his life wasted, and he's still one of our resource kids. I keep going back, though, to the great second year of 1st grade that he did have--if we could have built on that the right way, would things have worked out differently?

We have to consider, too, that the research on retention is overwhelmingly and completely negative. Nearly everything you'll ever find says that it works in the short term (like my boy above), but in the long run you increase their risk of dropping out, failing, and becoming communists. This is established fact.

And yet here I am, having two more kids repeat the grade again this year.

Damn the head, my heart tells me they need it. I think about sending them on to 2nd grade and I cringe, because they are not ready. They don't qualify for Sped because of their age, but they didn't respond to any other intervention I tried this year, either. I'm desperate to protect them from certain failure around the corner, but I also can't deny what the research says.

And yet I do deny it, an angry speck in front of an uncaring God, refuting the obvious because it suits me, yelling denials into the dark vast, because dammit I know I'm right and what does a PhD really mean anyway and I know my kids and the rules say I can so nyah and...

and...

and...

The questions come flooding in. Am I throwing away a year of their lives, or am I making their lives better by giving them what they need? Am I being overprotective, or just doing the best I can in a system that can't do what I need it to do? When they look back will they call what I gave them their golden opportunity or just one more bull*hit encounter, first in a bitter series with the schools?

So I struggle with it, pray, and hope for the best, as we all do. I forget sometimes the real power I have to shape these lives, a startling responsibility yet so easy to lose sight of under the paperwork, the bad news, and the day-to-day dealings of the classroom. Then retention time comes up and reminds me again.

My God, I'm a teacher. Lord, please--help me not to screw this up.

Read more here, if any.