your thoughts on retention tied to NCLB

[doni_georgia]

I'm about to leave to go teach (first day back from spring break). We have one week to get these kids ready for state mandated tests. This year, like many other states, we have a new retention policy in place saying kids who do not pass the state test in 3rd grade will have to be retained next year. What do you guys think about this? What do you think about NCLB?

My own opinion on the retention policy is if I kid gets to 3rd grade not able to read, it's really hard for him/her to ever catch up. I teach 5th grade, and next year we start retaining 5th graders who don't pass the reading and math tests. I know from experience that it is nearly impossible to catch a 5th grader up to grade level. But we're somehow (despite differences in intellectual capacity) supposed to get ALL kids on grade level in the next 10 years. I doubt dubya could pass the highschool test here. Shoot, wouldn't be surprised if he couldn't pass portions of the 5th grade test.

[teach1st]

1. Studies in Chicago Fault Holding Back of 3rd Graders

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/education/07school.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=

New York Times
April 7, 2004
Studies in Chicago Fault Holding Back of 3rd Graders
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Chicago's aggressive nine-year effort to end social promotion, which served as a model for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's new third-grade retention policy, has been enormously expensive while yielding few benefits, according to two studies released yesterday by researchers who have monitored the effort.

The reports found that the strict promotion rules, adopted in the 1995-96 school year, had not helped third graders, had sharply increased special education placements for third and sixth graders and had led to a higher dropout rate for students who were forced to repeat eighth grade.

The studies offer the most comprehensive examination to date of a large urban school system that adopted a stringent policy of holding back its lowest-achieving students based on test scores. Many of its results, however, were foreshadowed in earlier studies, including one that examined a similar program in New York two decades ago that was quickly abandoned.

<snip>

"In third grade, across the studies, I see no benefits," said Melissa Roderick, the chief investigator for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Chicago that prepared the studies.

More

[TreasonousBastard]

3. This debate is big around here...

with Bloomberg's attempt to kill off social promotion.

From what I've been hearing, holding kids back is a big mistake. The kids do no better scholastically, and have the added pressure of having their whole social structure upset, and being labelled "dummies."

There seems to be no way around the simple fact that the kids who are not learning up to speed need more help, and repeating a grade is not the kind of help they need.

When I was a kid, repeating grades was not uncommon, and we had "600" schools and other things that seemed to be good ideas at the time. As always, politics was involved in all the changes since, and things just never seem to get better.

[teach1st]

2. What processes will be put in place?

As much as I grumble when I get fifth graders reading at second grade level, I've rarely seen retention help these kids (it does help once in a while). I've seen it hurt quite a few. Also, having a few 13-year old retainees in fifth grade can really hurt the fifth graders who are learning, since some of these kids have given up on learning and do tend to act out.

What processes will be put in place in order for these third graders to get help? Are there going to be special third grade classes for these retained students or are they going to dumped back into whatever it was that failed them in the first place? What about the students who didn't pass the test because of "other" issues - abuse, neglect, poverty. Are these issues going to be addressed? If not, nothing will change.

Money at the teaching level is being drained from our system at an alarming rate. We just dumped 400 aide positions locally. Summer enrichment, summer school? No more. How are we going to pay for the help these students need?

If we really did something to help the low-performers instead of simply retain, I'd feel a little better about all of this. Traditional classroom structure may not be working for these kids. Perhaps we need to look at:

Summer bridge programs

More looping for at-risk kids

Multi-age classrooms

Homogenous classrooms with dynamic teachers for some of the at-risk kids

Appropriate training for teachers

Family learning liasons

More early identification and remediation - easier access to more authentic assessment (and the time to implement the implications of the assessment)

More funding for appropriate technologies

We need structures in place. It costs money, but perhaps not as much as wholesale retention costs in human terms.

National Association of School Psychologists
http://www.nasponline.org/pdf/graderetention.pdf

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses examining research over the past century (studies between 1911-1999) conclude that the cumulative evidence does not support the use of grade retention as an intervention for academic achievement or socio-emotional adjustment problems (Holmes, 1989; Jimerson, 2001). Recent comparisons of academic achievement (i.e., reading, math, and language) and socio-emotional adjustment (i.e., emotional adjustment, peer competence, problem behaviors, attendance and self-esteem) between retained and matched comparison students, reported in 19 studies published during the 1990s, yielded negative effects of grade retention across all areas of achievement and socio-emotional adjustment (Jimerson, 2001). Research also fails to find significant differences between groups of students retained early (kindergarten through 3rd grade) or later (4th through 8th grades). What is most important is that, across studies, retention at any grade level is associated with later high school dropout, as well as other deleterious long-term effects. Typically, the test scores of students who are retained in the primary grades may increase for a couple of years and then decline below those of their equally low-achieving but socially promoted peers. The temporary benefits of retention are deceptive, as teachers do not usually follow student progress beyond a few years.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. I used to teach third grade

I got a group of boys in my class who couldn't read, even at a pre-primer level. Instead of using the regular textbooks, I used hotrod magazine, had the kids write their own stories, and taught them to read (this was 1973, btw). They were all reading by the end of the year-but at a second grade level. If they'd have had to take the tests like they do now, they'd have all been held back, despite the fact that they had made great gains. At least one kid, and maybe more, had already been detained. FYI, all of these kids went on to graduate. Don't think any of them were held back again. The last I heard (I left the district in '89),at least one was in college and one had started his own business. I hate to think what would have happened if they had just been held back again and again because they weren't reading up to a certain standard. Some people start slower than others, and it takes a while for them to catch up, but all these boys did, eventually.

Guess by today's standards, I'd be a poor teacher because I only got these kids to reading on second grade level. Glad I'm out of teaching.

[LWolf]

5. It's wrong.

The bottom line on retention: it almost never works.

A note from Alfie Kohn:

The same get-tough sensibility that has loosed an avalanche of testing has led to a self-congratulatory war on “social promotion” that consists of forcing students to repeat a grade. The preponderance of evidence indicates that this is just about the worst course of action to take with struggling children in terms of both its academic and social-psychological effects. And the evidence uniformly demonstrates that retention increases the chance that a student will leave school; in fact, it’s an even stronger predictor of dropping out than is socioeconomic status.(33)

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/testtoday.htm

More here at DU:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=117&topic_id=2744#2761

See my reply # 8 for the mess this policy is creating in my classroom this year.