Repeating third grade helps English Learners succeed in middle and high school, concludes a new study of 40,000 Florida students, reports Ed Week‘s Corey Mitchell.
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Those who repeated 3rd grade learned English faster and took more advanced classes in middle and high school than similar students who moved on to 4th grade, concludes An Extra Year to Learn English?, which has been published as a working paper.
Florida requires third graders who fail a reading test to repeat the grade “with extra support, including extended blocks of daily reading instruction and summer school classes,” reports Mitchell. Those passed on to fourth grade don’t get extra support.
English Learners who scored just below the threshold to pass, and were retained, outperformed those who scored just above the passing line and were moved on.
Repeating third grade helped immigrants more than U.S.-born English Learners, notes Hechinger’s Jill Barshay. (Most English Learners in U.S. elementary schools are born in the U.S. to immigrant families.)
Those with higher third-grade math scores — an indicator that the kids were otherwise good learners — also benefited more from retention. Retention worked better for kids in wealthier elementary schools than schools with high poverty. In other words, retention may be a more potent solution for young kids whose families are relatively recent arrivals and haven’t endured multi-generational poverty in a low-income neighborhood.
. . . One theory for why repeating a grade works is that the human brain can only learn so many things at one time. And perhaps it is easiest for kids to focus on basic language acquisition before we start asking them to tackle the challenges of long division and metaphors in fourth and fifth grades.
“Making struggling students repeat third grade is an increasingly popular idea,” reports Barshay, but it remains controversial. “One 2014 study found that kids who were held back when they were young were less likely to graduate from high school,” compared to similar students who were promoted.