Over the years, the practice of “holding a student back,” formally known as retention, has become commonplace in schools. However, recently, schools have begun shying further and further away from retaining students.
Many parents celebrate school officials’ decisions to drop retention, but I don’t think most people see the full picture
The internet has been flooded with article after article citing frightening statistics about drop-out rates, teens with no friends, and links to depression. But how true are these studies?
Anyone can cite research about retention, but I don’t need statistics to understand its impact. I’ve lived it.
In first grade, I was at the bottom of my class. I struggled to read, write, and keep up with basic material. After a difficult conversation, my parents decided it was best to hold me back.
There seems to be an assumption that people who have been held back are ashamed of that fact. But for myself and most other people I know who have been held back, it happened at such a young age that it stops being a taboo topic and just ends up being a simple fact.
I can tell someone “I was held back as a child” with the same ease as saying “I had a sandwich for lunch today.”
Despite what many assume, being held back didn’t damage my confidence or isolate me socially. I adjusted quickly, made new friends, and didn’t notice anything was “different” until years later, and by then it didn’t matter.
What did matter, however, was the results. Now, as a junior in high school, I went from struggling to excelling, becoming an honors and advanced placement student with a 4.3 GPA.
I’ve also seen the other side of this issue play out within my own home. Like me, my sister struggled with reading in her early days of school. Recognizing the similarities between her and me, my parents requested she be held back, hoping it would have similar results as it did with me.
But the school denied the request, citing an institutional shift away from retention, and said that my mother would have to take her appeal to court if she wanted my sister to be held back.
Present day, as smart as she may be, my sister always feels like she’s playing catch-up with her peers in almost every area of school.
It raises the important question: if retention was able to remedy the same issue for me, why wasn’t the same opportunity available to my sister?
My experiences with retention challenge the commonly held belief that retaining students will inevitably lead to issues with socializing or lasting difficulty in school.
But, in the face of evidence implying that holding students back may have positive effects, many schools feel pressured to slowly phase out these practices. This decision to start retirement is only further handicapping the students who are already behind.
Typical K-12 schools, especially at the elementary level, build on previous knowledge year after year. If a student is still struggling to learn to read, how are they supposed to read to learn?
The main complaint against retention stems from the belief that a student who is behind will always be behind, but that just isn’t true. One of the biggest problems with allowing a struggling student to continue at such a young age is that by the time they’ve finally mastered multiplication, their classmates have moved on to long division, and the cycle continues. They’re perpetually one or two steps behind their peers.
Retaining students allows them to strengthen their foundational skills before advancing further in ways that “pushing forward” can’t do. So, by the time they’re caught up again, they’re not still trying to figure out the last unit.
Another common argument against retention stems from the misconception that it leads to higher dropout rates. Critics often cite statistics showing that a significant percentage of retained students eventually drop out of school, implying that retention causes students to drop out.
But this argument conflates correlation with causation.
In reality, the students who are held back are already struggling the most with their academics, and are therefore, by nature, already the most likely to fall behind in school, and want to drop out.
In other words, retention itself isn’t the problem; it’s a symptom of the same issue that leads to many students dropping out. Blaming retention for dropout rates is like saying increased ice cream sales cause more shark attacks — when in reality they are both just more common in the summertime.
Critics also argue that retention can be redundant if the student gets the same teacher again, since that will most likely lead to the same teaching style that was ineffective the first time.
However, this argument fails to acknowledge how schools actually operate. Administrators, while usually against requesting certain teachers, are more than accommodating for struggling students. So, more often than not, the final say in choosing a teacher comes down to the parents.
More importantly, retention isn’t just meant to be a one-to-one repeat of the student’s previous experience; it’s meant to be a second chance at learning and allows students to take what learning strategies and existing knowledge they’ve acquired from their first go-round and reapply it with a greater foundational understanding of the topic.
This isn’t to say that retention guarantees a student’s success. It’s important to note that many students, especially those who choose not to take advantage of their second chance, may not greatly benefit from retention, but giving them the chance to improve their foundational skills before moving on to more advanced topics cultivates more success than pushing them forward unprepared.
Schools choosing to shy away from retaining students is ultimately a massive detriment to the kids who could have benefited from the second chance it provides.
My academic history is a testament to the potential that retention holds, yet my sister is being denied that same opportunity. Now, I can’t help but ask why a potentially life-changing second chance is being withheld from students based on theoreticals, rather than individuals’ needs.
