From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
Recently, Marion Brady offered thought-provoking insights on educational policy that deserve serious consideration, something that many Democrat and Republican politicians are loathe to do.
Learning Disabilities: The Tragedy of Retention
From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
At this time of year, teachers and parents think about retaining children with academic problems. Those who support retention argue that these children will benefit from repeating a grade. Retention will give the student an opportunity to review the material, or mature socially and emotionally. It will motivate the student to do better, to avoid future retention. Educators, politicians and parents who support “standards” and attack “social promotion” (automatically advancing students from grade to grade, despite poor achievement) vigorously support retention. They argue that retention sends students the clear message that they must master what was taught to advance to the next grade. In one sense, retention advocates have been very successful—almost 50% of students are retained by grade nine. In another sense they have failed—these children do not improve academically. Moreover, retention is extraordinarily costly. It hurts children and wastes untold dollars.
Retention rarely helps children with reading disabilities become competent readers. Keeping them in the same kind of situation in which they struggled is unlikely to produce better results. Giving them another year to master what they failed to master—without major changes in situations and services and instruction—is unlikely to work, as it has rarely worked in the past. It may well harm them.
The latest issue of the Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties sheds light on the issue. In summarizing the information about Chicago’s aggressive policy of retaining students, Mary Abbott and her colleagues noted that many children may have been harmed by retention:
A parent recently asked me if she should delay registering her son for kindergarten. She thought he had learning problems that would create problems in kindergarten. My response was that the research, though insufficient and contradictory, didn’t support delay. Here’s a sample of the research findings:
The results of the current study … indicate that delayed kindergarten entrance [called academic red-shirting] is not associated with better academic achievement among children with learning disabilities…. Academic red-shirting does not appear to function as an intervention, in and of itself, that will compensate for a child having a learning disability. The practice of academic red-shirting, by itself, should not be considered an intervention for a child with a learning disability. (Barnard-Brak, 2008, p. 50).
Several months ago, The New York Times published a blog by Will Okun, a Chicago high-school teacher who was worried about Etta, a conscientious, enthusiastic, hard working student whom he might have to fail. His blog was touching, perceptive, and troubling. It dealt with an all-too-common dilemma that affects struggling readers and their teachers. He wrote:
If your child has a reading disability, like dyslexia, if he feels defeated, hates school, and comes home sullen and miserable and angry, Dr. Richard Selznick’s The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child (Sentient Publishing, 2009) can be of tremendous help. It can help you better understand why he’s miserable or angry. It can help you to better understand dyslexia and its emotional effects. More importantly, it gives you simple, sound, and practical advice on how to help him.
Here are a few samples:
If legally possible, no!
These three quotations tell you why:
1) “The large majority of all [research] studies do not find any positive results from grade retention. In most cases, students’ achievement and self-esteem are shown to drop after retention. Retained students are more likely to drop out of school, and the economic cost of retention is high” (Holmes & Saturday, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 2000).
2) “A century of research … fails to support the efficacy of grade retention” (National Association of School Psychologists, Position Statement, 2003).
