HOLDING STUDENTS BACK SHOWS PROMISE IN CHICAGO

Date: Saturday, January 15, 2005

When a school district is willing to hold children back, what's important is not only what happens to the children, but also how the rest of the education system behaves because it knows they will be held back.

Ending the practice of "social promotion," passing children along to the next grade regardless of how much or how little they've learned, is usually controversial. Opponents argue that it's harmful socially to children to be left back and it doesn't help them educationally either.

Controversy or no, Chicago adopted a retention policy in 1997, under the leadership of Mayor Richard Daley, who had taken over the Chicago Public Schools in 1995. Two articles in the Winter 2005 issue of the journal Education Next examine what has happened since.

As author Alexander Russo explains, the new policy required children in the third, sixth and eighth grades who scored below cutoff scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to attend summer school, or to repeat a grade, more than once if necessary. Retention rates rose from almost nothing to from 7 percent to 20 percent, depending on the year and grade.

"Test scores among Chicago's lowest-performing students rose, particularly in the upper grades," Russo says, "while the proportion of schools with extremely low performance fell."

Russo also cites a study by Brian Jacob of Harvard and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young, which compared students who fell just below the cutoff (and thus faced retention and had to attend summer school) with those who fell just above it. Those who faced retention improved substantially more.

Retention is not a panacea, not that anyone ever claimed it was. Russo notes that the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which tends to be skeptical about the policy, said in April, "The bottom line is that, without substantial supports, neither social promotion nor retention will improve low-performing students." Unfortunately, additional support for retained students was often lacking.

The retention policy affects more students than just the ones who do repeat a grade, however. It motivates some students to work harder so they won't be held back. Russo quotes G. Alfred Hess of Northwestern University, who says that the effect of the threat of retention on all students and their families is also part of the justification for retaining students. "This dual intent for ending the social promotion policy is frequently ignored by its opponents and is rarely considered in evaluating the effectiveness of the policy," Hess wrote.

But students and their families are not the only ones affected by a retention policy. So are teachers and principals. The second article, by Robin Tepper Stone of Abt Associates Inc. and Susan Stone at the University of California at Berkeley, explores the responses to an ongoing study of Chicago schools that the consortium has been conducting since 1994.

Teachers largely felt that the end of social promotion was positive. More than 80 percent of them agreed, most of them strongly, with statements such as "I am more sensitive to individual student needs and problems," or "nearly all teachers feel extra responsibility to help students meet standards," or "the policy has made parents more concerned about students' progress." And two-thirds agreed that "The threat of retention motivates students to work harder."

Many more eighth-grade students participate in after-school academic programs, in some cases because schools now require it for students at risk of retention. Pre-retention, 16 percent of students at moderate risk of retention took part. In 1997, the first year of the new policy, participation doubled, and by 2001, it was up to 43 percent. For students at high risk, it nearly doubled, from 18 percent to 34 percent.

Teachers did report spending more time on test preparation. But they also reported, for example, spending more time on grade-level math in eighth grade, and less time on material that should have been learned in the early elementary grades.

Students also noticed the difference. In surveys, they were asked whether their teachers were willing to offer them extra help or would notice when they were having difficulty. After the policy change, students were more likely to say yes, and moreover the lowest-performing students showed the biggest increases. The gap between them and their classmates didn't close, but it narrowed. The same was true when students were asked about how much support for their schoolwork they got from their parents.

Chicago is the nation's third-largest district, and even though it has improved in the past decade, it has a long way to go. Recently the focus has shifted to adopting policies that would help ensure that fewer children need to be held back. The criteria for retention have softened around the edges. But despite the controversy, retention for students who need it remains the district's policy.