This surprises me. I wonder if it holds true in a larger sample. From "Number 2 Pencil" blog.
Can students ever move forward after being held back?
What's wrong with mandatory retention of New York City third-graders? Lots, says Principal Leonard Golubchick, and it sounds like he knows what he's talking about:
...when Dr. Golubchick read of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's new mandatory retention policy to hold back every child who failed the city's third-grade reading test, two words raced through the veteran principal's mind: "Big mistake."
Dr. Golubchick was P.S. 20's principal in 1981, during the Koch administration, the last time New York City tried mandatory retention based on a test score alone. The oratory then sounded as beautiful as it does now...In that 1981 "gates" program, children who failed the fourth- or seventh-grade reading tests could attend summer school and retake the test, but if they failed again, they were held back and put in "gates" classes. Those classes were small - 15 to 18 - and meant to give the retained child intensive instruction.
City officials initially hailed the program, but because it was so expensive - 1,100 extra teachers were employed for the 25,000 retained students at a cost estimated at $40 million to $70 million - an independent expert, Ernest House (now at the University of Colorado), was hired to do an assessment. Dr. House found that the retained students performed no better academically than similar low-achieving students who had not been retained...
A follow-up study by the city in 1986 found that half the retained fourth graders also were retained in seventh grade, which is what Dr. Golubchick remembers most...In short, New York's 1981 mandatory retention program violated the most basic rule of medicine: first do no harm...
Dr. House and Dr, Golubchick say the money is better spent on creating classes of 20 in kindergarten through third grade, more individualized tutoring and high-quality summer school. "Why flunk them to give them the services they need?" Dr. House said. "Why not just give them the services?"
New York insists that this time, mandatory retention will work, because students will recieve a "rigorous curriculum" meant to help them improve. Dr. Golubchick disagrees:
Each year after consulting with teachers, counselors and parents, Dr. Golubchick does hold back about 20, in a school of 885. He retained Samantha Tsi in third grade. Says Dr. Golubchick, "She is an only child, Chinese was spoken at home, we felt she was young for her age and needed a year to grow."
Samantha did grow, from [a test score of] 1 to 4. "You have to make the decision based on best interest of the child," he says. "Not best interest of the bureaucracy."
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