Retention Under Chicago’s High-Stakes Testing Program: Helpful, Harmful, or Harmless?

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, the Chicago Public Schools declared an end to social promotion and instituted promotional requirements based on standardized test scores in the third, sixth, and eighth grades. This article examines the experience of third and sixth graders who were retained under Chicago's policy from 1997 to 2000. The authors examine the progress of these students for 2 years after they were retained and estimate the short-term effects of retention on reading achievement. Students who were retained under Chicago's high-stakes testing policy continued to struggle during their retained year and faced significantly increased rates of special education placement. Among third graders, there is no evidence that retention led to greater achievement growth 2 years after the promotional gate. Among sixth graders, there is evidence that retention was associated with lower achievement growth. The effects of retention were estimated by using a growth curve analysis. Comparison groups were constructed by using variation across time in the administration of the policy, and by comparing the achievement growth of a group of low-achieving students who just missed passing the promotional cutoff to a comparison group of students who narrowly met the promotional cutoff at the end of the summer. The robustness of the findings was tested using an instrumental variable approach to address selection effects in estimates.

Reading and School Completion: Critical Connections and Matthew Effects

“…Despite the consistent findings regarding the effects of grade retention, retention rates have increased in the past several years (Frey, 2005;National Association of School Psychologists, 2003), likely a result of the proliferation of policies and public sentiment to end social promotion and the inclusion of grade retention as an integral part of school reform and accountability initiatives (Bali, Anagnostopoulos, & Roberts, 2005). The marriage of grade retention and accountability appears to increase the likelihood of students being placed in special education (Roderick & Nagaoka, 2005), which is, for a number of students, a precursor of later dropout.…”

The Recovery of Students’ Autonomy for Future Curriculum; Aesthetics of Conflicts

“…Sometimes, good intentions of the curriculum such as national high-stake test cause negative impacts on students (e.g. Roderick, 2005). Therefore, it requires that the interrelation should be reviewed on Yin-Yang Dialectics.…”

Examining the streams of a retention policy to understand the politics of high-stakes reform.

“…However, they conclude that the current framing of grade retention within U.S. public schools, which typically has students simply repeat the same grade, offers an "early positive" but "later negative effect" for these students (p. ix). While these reforms measures produce an uneven set of results, many educational researchers believe that the immediate short-term gains in test scores do not outweigh the long-lasting negative effects that result from this intervention (e.g., Roderick & Nagaoka, 2005).…”