Issue 31: Grade Retention and Reading Difficulties | David P. Hurford & Alex C. Fender

Olivia is a struggling reader who is now repeating 3rd grade because she did not pass the high-stakes reading test her state requires for her to be promoted to 4th grade. Her mother noticed in kindergarten that Olivia was not picking up on learning to read and voiced her concerns at the time. As is often the case, she was told that children are at different places developmentally, to give Olivia time, and not to worry. Olivia’s mother was still worried and continues to worry. Now that Olivia is facing third grade again, Olivia’s mother sees her daughter losing interest in school. Olivia does not like school, believes that her teacher does not like her, and notices her classmates snicker when she misspells a word on the whiteboard or has difficulty reading a word. Olivia and her parents have been working on homework assignments every evening for hours, completing work that other children spend only 30 minutes on. Everyone in Olivia’s family is feeling the emotional and psychological effects of her struggles learning to read, and now that she is going to be retained, these feelings are more intense.

Olivia is a fictionalized student, but we see students and their families who frequently report the very same issues at our Center for READing (Center for Research, Evaluation, and Awareness of Dyslexia). There are several issues related to Olivia’s case. Let’s first talk about what grade retention is.

Grade Retention

Grade retention is an educational strategy in which students who do not make appropriate academic progress are retained in their current grade for another year. The hope is that repeating a grade will give students another year to mature and master concepts and skills they missed during their first attempt at that grade and those concepts. To some extent, grade retention stems from Jean Piaget's notion of readiness. In Piaget's theory of cognitive development, children are ready for more advanced concepts once they have reached an appropriate level of cognitive development needed to learn those advanced concepts. The notion is that a child cannot learn what they are not ready to learn. On the other hand, another cognitive developmental theorist, Lev Vygotsky, believed that learning occurs through a social context, too. One of his important contributions was the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, which refers to what a person can do with guidance versus what a person can do independently. Educationally speaking, a teacher provides assistance until a student understands the concept or can engage in the ability independently. Teachers often use the phrase, "I do" (showing the students how to do something), "we do" (the teacher and class do it together), and "you do" (the student works independently). Vygotsky also talks about how to support students until they have acquired the concept or skill. That is, Vygotsky uses the term "scaffolding" to mean that a teacher, coach, or more knowledgeable person provides temporary support to meet the student's needs while the student builds their skills. As the student's skills develop, the scaffolding is gradually reduced until it is removed altogether and the student performs independently.

Examining grade retention through Piagetian and Vygotskian lenses produces differing notions of its appropriateness. Extrapolating from Piaget, retention seems a viable option. The student has not mastered enough in the current grade to demonstrate advancement to the next. They are not ready. Repeating a grade should help the student gain the maturity needed to be promoted to the next grade. Extrapolating from Vygotsky, retention is not such a great idea. Instead of providing the specialized scaffolding that the student needs, the student simply returns to the beginning of the process and repeats it with different students. Retention also separates the student from their peer group, who, according to Vygotsky, are also great sources of learning and support.

How Many Students Repeat a Grade?

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) includes 38 member countries. The OECD’s mission is to “promote policies that improve the economic and social well-being of people worldwide.” The OECD has more than 300 committees and expert groups that collaborate to address public policy. To be effective, they gather data to determine how well their member countries are doing. One of the tools that is used is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which collects data from 15-year-olds. It includes various questions about demographics, socio-economic status, student well-being, school climate and engagement, and digital habits. One of the questions asks how many times a student repeated a grade at least once. The range of responses by country was very large. On average, 12.5% of students in OECD countries reported having repeated a grade at least once. In the United States, 11% to 14% responded that they had repeated a grade at least once, while only 5% of 15-year-olds in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada had repeated a grade. Interestingly, the rates reported by the students themselves are somewhat different from the official retention rates cited by government education departments. According to the OECD, socioeconomically disadvantaged students are more likely to have repeated a grade at least once in their academic careers.

In New Zealand, students are taught in ability groups but kept in their same age peer group. Specialized services for lower-performing students are preferred to grade retention. Australia allows for grade retention, but the practice is regulated and discouraged and thus relatively low. Like New Zealand, differentiated and personalized instruction is preferred over retention, which includes individual education plans (IEPs) or individual curriculum plans (ICPs). The most likely grades to be repeated are kindergarten and first grade. In the United States, grade retention varies across states. Some states have statutes requiring grade retention if a student has not passed their reading assessment test during third grade. Therefore, grade retention is high. There is a very low probability of grade retention in Nordic countries, where children are generally promoted to the next grade automatically.

Does Grade Retention Work?

To cut to the point, no, not really. Overall, for most children, regardless of the reason for concern, retention does not really do what is intended. That is, retention does not help a child “catch up” with their peer group. Students who are retained in elementary grades may seem to do well for a year or two. However, over time, they tend to perform even more poorly academically, develop more negative attitudes about school, and are significantly more likely to drop out of school. None of these things are good and is certainly not intended to be the outcome. This is the case regardless of the reason why a student is being considered for retention.

Researching grade retention is tricky. Randomly assigning participants to intervention and control groups is an important part of high-quality research. However, it is not ethical to randomly assign students to be retained or advanced. Instead, researchers compare students who were identified to be retained but were not retained with those who were identified to be retained and were retained. What muddies the waters even more is that many studies examining grade retention have assumed that those who were retained received services geared toward improving their academic performance, and assumed that those who were promoted to the next grade did not. Recent research has found that neither is always the case. Some of those who are retained do not receive additional services beyond repeating the grade and receiving the same curriculum a second time. In contrast, those who were promoted to the next grade and flagged for potential retention receive additional services. Children from families with the resources to pay for tutoring services outside of school are likely to receive them once the difficulty has been identified. Parents currently spend nearly $150B annually on tutoring for their children, and the tutoring industry is estimated to surpass $210B by 2030.

Most students struggle academically due to a lack of reading skills. In fact, the overwhelming number of students who receive special education and related services (80%) or are approved for accommodations (e.g., 504 Plans, 30%) have a specific learning disability in reading. Difficulties learning to read have little to do with motivation or interest in learning to read. Most parents have witnessed their 4-year-olds scribbling on a piece of paper or using a stylus on a tablet. The parent asks, “What are you doing?” and the child says, “Writing!” Of course, they are not, but they see others reading and writing to communicate and want to do so too. We are wired to communicate, and young children are typically highly motivated to learn to read, spell, and write. They become very disappointed and frustrated when they find themselves struggling to learn to read while it seems like everyone else is successful. Of course, in a typical classroom, these children are not alone. By 4th grade in the United States, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, 40% of students are struggling with reading. For these students and the school systems charged with serving them, we know that grade retention is not a great idea.

Why are there so Many Children Struggling to Read, Spell, and Write?

The goal of reading is comprehension. Theorists, scientists, and educators have long sought to determine the best methods to teach reading. Many early ideas focused on comprehension without considering how a student gets to that goal. Horace Mann, for example, believed that the best way to teach reading was to focus on words and their meaning rather than the underlying code. He viewed letters as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” that detracted from meaning. Mann thought that children should be exposed to familiar words repeatedly until the child absorbed the ability to read them. This was essentially the beginning of the Whole Word or Whole Language methods. Although Mann was not correct about how reading works or how it should be taught, his intentions were good: to help children learn to read. Mann wrote that “a house without books is like a room without windows.” He cared about student learning, but he was wrong about how to get there.

Fully understanding the essential skills needed for a person to learn to read requires a brief discussion of writing systems. Writing systems refer to how a spoken language is represented in visual form. There are writing systems that use symbols to represent entire words or units of meaning (e.g., logographic writing systems like Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, Mayan Script, etc.), syllables (e.g., Hiragana), a mixture of meaning and the sounds of the language (e.g., Hanzi), and those that represent the sounds of a language. Abjad (e.g., Hebrew) represent consonant sounds, and the vowels are determined from context, while abugida (e.g., Devanagari) uses base characters that are consonants with the vowels indicated by a notation. The English Writing System is based on an alphabet that represents both vowels and consonants. An important part of any writing system is that it is a symbolic representation of its language, either in meaning or in sounds. Writing systems are codes for spoken language.

Since alphabetically based writing systems represent the individual sounds of the spoken language, users must translate symbols into their sounds to read and the spoken form into symbols to spell and write. Translating letters into their sounds is called decoding. Translating sounds into letters is encoding. Learning to read requires that the person decode each word, letter by letter, into their respective sounds and then blend those sounds together. Vocabulary is critically important too because the person must know the meaning of the word they just decoded for the enterprise to make sense.

Instructional methods that focus on words rather than their underlying sounds are collectively referred to as the “three cueing system” (e.g., Reading Recovery, Balanced Literacy, Units of Study, Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, Whole Language, Whole Word). These methods are deeply flawed and ignore what science has discovered regarding reading and how to teach reading acquisition. These methods have also led to a large number (40% currently) who fail to learn to read. Dr Robert Pasternack, who was the Assistant Secretary of Education for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services during the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act in the United States, refers to children who have not been provided with the appropriate instruction to learn to read as children who “ain’t been taught (ABT).” Should children who are ABT be punished for their inability to acquire reading skills if the cause of their failure is the system? While some students can learn to read regardless of the quality of instruction, a great many cannot. If a student is not provided with an instructional method that helps them acquire the concept, the fault does not lie with the student but with the system.

The need to differentiate between methods of teaching reading that are not based on science and those that are gave birth to the term “Science of Reading.” The Science of Reading refers to all that is known about every aspect of reading, vetted through scientific research. The Science of Reading is a vast multidisciplinary body of knowledge that includes the various subskills necessary to learn to read (e.g., phonemic processing, sound-letter relationships, language development, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension, etc.), how to teach reading (e.g., explicitly and systematically helping children understand that the alphabetic writing system is a code and how to use it to read, spell, and write), how to help struggling readers, and what components are needed to learn to read (e.g., neurological, social, etc.). The Science of Reading refers to everything that we know about reading that has been determined through science rather than a person’s belief system.

What Can Be Done to Help Struggling Readers?

Generally, grade retention does not improve academic performance.

Generally, grade retention is not successful. Although there are some exceptional cases, it is extremely difficult to predict who will benefit. Generally, grade retention does not improve academic performance, causes psychological and emotional difficulties, and increases the likelihood of dropping out of school. Children who are disadvantaged are more likely to be retained, further exacerbating poor economic prospects for them.