Over the past year, one of the most heavily debated topics in Ohio education has been the retention provision of the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, a decade-old package of early literacy reforms. Under the retention policy, schools must hold back students (with limited exceptions) who are struggling to read at the end of third grade and provide them intensive literacy supports. This requirement aims to ensure that all children have foundational reading skills before they are asked to tackle more challenging material in the middle and upper grades.
Despite the sound rationale, critics have long decried the policy as being hurtful to retained students. Their claims are often based in anecdote and crude interpretation of data. In November, the State Board of Education—a body that has been hostile to retention—presented data showing that less than one in six retained students achieve the state’s reading proficiency target in subsequent years. Based on these numbers, board members argued that the policy “has not achieved the desired result” and passed a resolution asking the legislature to scrap the requirement (which lawmakers have, so far, not done).
Yet such a brazen condemnation of Ohio’s Reading Guarantee is hardly warranted based on these data. Instead, as the debate continues, policymakers should heed more credible evidence about the effectiveness of retention, including a brand-new study that examines Indiana’s third-grade retention policy, to which we return a few paragraphs hence.
Let’s first review some problems with using raw proficiency numbers to make judgments about retention.
For starters, retained students could be making good progress in later grades, but focusing only on their “proficiency”—a relatively high bar that roughly 40 percent of Ohio students fall short of—would overlook those gains. Obviously, ensuring that every student is a proficient reader is an important goal for schools. But progress toward proficiency matters, too. Perhaps a retained student is moving from the 2nd to 15th percentile by fifth grade. That type of growth should also be part of any evaluation of the retention policy. Moreover, the raw numbers lack any context that could help us understand the actual impact of retention. How do retained students perform relative to other low-achieving students who narrowly pass the reading requirement? Do they make more or less progress than their close counterparts? Answers to such questions would provide a clearer picture of whether retention is better for low-achieving students than the alternative of “socially promoting” them.
Unfortunately, a careful evaluation of Ohio’s third-grade retention policy has not yet been undertaken. That should certainly change. But there has been strong empirical work from Florida that uncovers positive effects of retention under its early literacy law (those findings are discussed in an earlier piece). A recent report published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University also reveals positive impacts of third grade retention in Indiana.
The analysis was conducted by Cory Koedel of the University of Missouri and NaYoung Hwang of the University of New Hampshire. Akin to Ohio’s and Florida’s reading policy, Indiana requires third graders to achieve a certain target on state reading exams in order to be promoted to fourth grade. The policy went into effect in 2011–12 and the analysts examine data through 2016–17. Using a “regression discontinuity” approach, Koedel and Hwang compare the fourth through seventh grade outcomes of retained students to their peers who just barely passed Indiana’s promotional threshold. This methodology (also used in the aforementioned Florida study) provides strong causal evidence—almost as good as a “gold standard” experiment—about the effect of holding back low-achieving third graders.
Here are Indiana’s impressive results:
- In fourth grade, retained students achieve much higher state exam scores—in both math and reading—than students who just barely passed the promotional threshold in third grade. The academic boost for retained students persists through seventh grade, though the magnitude of the impact somewhat fades over time.
- The results are consistently positive across student groups, with the average Black, Hispanic, and White student experiencing gains from retention. Likewise, both economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged retained students post higher subsequent scores than marginally promoted peers.
- The study finds no significant impacts of retention on disciplinary or attendance outcomes—a finding that helps to alleviate concerns that retention demotivates students or leads to negative behavior at school.
The authors conclude, “Taken on the whole, our findings of positive achievement effects of the Indiana policy, coupled with the lack of negative effects on attendance and disciplinary outcomes, suggest grade retention is a promising intervention for students who are struggling academically early in their schooling careers.”
When lawmakers passed the Buckeye State’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee more than a decade ago, they did so because they recognized the importance of early literacy to students’ long-term success. Dropping the retention provision of the guarantee based on anecdotes and flimsy data would be reckless, potentially leaving thousands of Ohio students at risk of not receiving the extra time and support they need to read fluently. Holding back third graders struggling to read has worked in other states. It can work—and may very well be working—in Ohio, as well.
