To Retain or Not Retain? That Actually Is Not the Question “Retention as a remedial intervention has resulted in limited to no evidence of improving academic outcomes and life outcomes for students” By Kim Gibbons, PhD., Katie Pekel, EdD., Laura Potter, PhD., and Ellina Xiong, PhD
Kim Gibbons, Ph.D., is the Director of CAREI.
Laura Potter, PhD
As the conclusion to a very trying school year has come to pass, and we turn our focus to summer school and next fall, there are likely lingering wonderings among educators and parents: Did [insert student name] learn enough to go to the next grade? While the question is understandable, it is important to situate this question in two important contexts. The first: a global pandemic. As individual teachers and parents worry about individual students, and educators and leaders worry about groups of students, we need to remember that ALL kids lived through this time and thus it is not as if only some were disrupted. The second context we must consider is what we know about retention; the research on retention as a practice is abundantly clear: it is not in the long-term best interest of students. It is this topic – retention – that we feel it important to discuss in this article so that when we are faced with these decisions at a policy or even an individual student level, we are entering these discussions grounded in sound research. What is Retention?
Katie Pekel, Ed.D.
20
JULY–AUGUST 2021
Ellina Xiong, PhD
Retention is the practice of requiring students to repeat or remain in a given grade level for an additional subsequent school year, or waiting to enroll students into kindergarten past the time when they are age-eligible (e.g., “repeating a grade,” “being held back,” ”flunking”). Many families and school teams retain students based on the belief that children will learn more academically or develop further social-emotionally by repeating a grade (Krier, 2012; Fait,
MINNESOTA SCHOOL BOARDS ASSOCIATION | JOURNAL
