A new Education Next report, PDF (585KB), Getting Ahead By Staying Behind: An Evaluation of Florida's Program to End Social Promotion, examines school retention.

A new Education Next report, PDF (585KB), Getting Ahead By Staying Behind: An Evaluation of Florida's Program to End Social Promotion, examines school retention. In 2002, Florida began mandating that third graders score at the Level-2 Benchmark on the state assessment in order to graduate to the fourth grade. The report's authors compared low-scoring third grade students in 2002, who were subject to the retention law, with low-scoring third graders the year before the law was instated. They found that on later tests, students identified for retention (whether or not they were held back) performed better than students for whom retention was not a possibility. The authors note, "The policy's greatest benefits could result not from retention itself, but rather from increased efforts on the part of teachers and even students to avoid being retained in the first place." (Spring 2006)