Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Student grade retention is known to have adverse impacts on academic achievement. In this project, we update and expand existing research. We overcome previous limitations through a variety of mechanisms, including utilizing more recent data to validate earlier findings, examining whether the impact of retention has changed over time, and extending outcome measures to postsecondary attainment. We use the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to assess how grade retention impacts students' academic achievements and the likelihood of high school graduation. We also examine more distal outcomes of college enrollment and persistence. We estimate several models of retention on subsequent academic outcomes by comparing students retained in grade to students with comparable demographic characteristics and academic performance. First, we estimate models to understand the predictors of retention across different educational stages. Secondly, we exploit differences across the number of times and grades in which retention occurs to estimate academic outcomes. We expect to find that grade retention will negatively impact academic achievement. Additionally, we predict that retention will have a more significant impact on students retained in later grades. Understanding retention will help us better understand why students depart from secondary and postsecondary institutions.