Grade retention

Grade retention or grade repetition is the process of having a student repeat a grade, because last year, the student experienced developmental delays which made the student fail the grade. Students who repeat a grade are referred as "repeaters". Repeaters can be referred to as having been "held back". Students do not necessarily repeat the grade in the same classroom, but it will be the same grade.

The alternative to grade retention (for those who have failed) is a policy of social promotion, under the ideological principle that staying with their same-age peers is important. Social promotion is the obligatory promotion of all students, regardless of achievement and absences. Social promotion is somewhat more accepted in countries which use tracking to group students according to academic ability. Regardless of whether a failing student is retained or promoted, academic scholars believe that underperformance must be addressed with intensive remedial help, such as summer school programs.

In most countries, grade retention has been banned or strongly discouraged. In the United States, grade retention can be used in kindergarten through twelfth grade. However, with older students, retention is usually restricted to the specific classes that the student failed, so that a student can be, for example, promoted in a math class but retained in a language class.

Where it is permitted, grade retention is most common among students in early elementary school. Students with intellectual disabilities are only retained when parents and school officials agree to do so. Children who are relatively young in their age cohort are four times more likely to be retained.

Different schools have used different approaches throughout history. Grade retention or repetition was essentially meaningless in the one-room schoolhouses of more than a century ago, because access to outside standards were very limited, and the small scale of the school, with perhaps only a few students of each age, was conducive to individualized instruction. With the proliferation of larger, graded schools in the middle of the 19th century, retention became a common practice. In fact, a century ago, approximately half of all American students were retained at least once before the age of 13.

Social promotion began to spread in the 1930s with concerns about the psychosocial effects of retention. Social promotion is the promoting of underperforming students under the ideological principle that staying with their same-age peers is important to success. This trend reversed in the 1980s, as concern about slipping academic standards rose.The practice of grade retention in the U.S. has been climbing steadily since the 1980s. The practice of making retention decisions on the basis of the results of a single test—called high-stakes testing—is widely condemned by professional educators. Test authors generally advise that their tests are not adequate for high-stakes decisions, and that decisions should be made based on all the facts and circumstances.

...
Wikipedia