Currently, there are approximately 1.3 million annual high school dropouts who potentially might lose $355 billion of income over their lifetimes. Effectively addressing retention and dropout issues has far-reaching societal implications. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between ninth-grade retention and on-time graduation. For the…

This paper uses public schools data to examine the effects of age on student academic achievement in light of recent trends to delay children's entry into kindergarten. To avoid problems of endogeneity, students' quarters of birth is employed as an instrument for age at entry. In particular, the effects of students' quarters of birth on math and…

A growing number of American states and school districts require students to meet basic performance standards in core academic subjects at key transition points in order to be promoted to the next grade. We exploit a discontinuity in the probability of third grade retention under a Florida test-based promotion policy to study the causal effect of…

The transition into high school is a traumatic event in an adolescent's life. Students face several emotional challenges during their high school years as they struggle to gain a sense of self, develop the tools needed to advocate for their own needs, and navigate the demands of a new school. A successful transition into high school has a…

Youth with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) frequently experience academic impairment, including lower grades than their peers and elevated risk for grade retention and school dropout. Medication is the most commonly used treatment for youth with ADHD, and it is therefore essential to understand the extent to which medication use…

Although the term "chronotope" may be unfamiliar, the meaning and significance of the construct resonate with many ELA teachers. Chronotope (Bakhtin,) captures how people come to make sense of stories and the characters that inhabit those stories. In this longitudinal case study, chronotope is used to explore what school literacy…

The voices of parents are not often heard in the literature and, when they are, it tends to be a litany of battles with the schooling system to achieve or not achieve some sort of acceleration for their gifted children (Gross, 2004). This retrospective study is unusual, as it is not based on a history of conflict. It is a positive account of…

In this article, the authors discuss two interventions deployed to remediate low performing students. The first is grade level retention in which a student is required to repeat a given grade due to lack of academic or social progress. The second is academic redshirting in which a parent voluntarily delays the entrance of her child into…

This article used the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) data to examine the relationship between exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) and child behavior problems (externalizing and internalizing), truancy, grade repetition, smoking, drinking, and use of marijuana. Longitudinal data analysis was conducted on 1,816…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether students retained in first grade, relative to similarly low-achieving students who were promoted, differed in the number of remedial educational services received by students in the pre-retention year and in the repeat year. Study participants were 769 relatively low-achieving first-grade…

Despite voluminous research on the detrimental effects of grade-level retention, it continues as a regular practice in American public schools as an intervention for struggling students. While research has been done on the roles and influences of teachers on the retention process, little has been done to measure the influence of the school…

Educational concepts, such as enrolment, attendance, passing or failing students, school retardation, and school desertion, which made it possible to describe the course of children through the school system, went through a gradual process, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of the twentieth. In…

Educators and policy makers confront challenging questions of ethics, justice, and equity on a regular basis. Should teachers retain a struggling student if it means she will most certainly drop out? Should an assignment plan favor middle-class families if it means strengthening the school system for all? These everyday dilemmas are both utterly…

This study explored student-level predictors of reading achievement among third grade regular education students. Predictors included student demographics (sex and socioeconomic status (SES), using free and reduced lunch as proxy for SES), direct observations of reading skills (oral reading fluency (ORF) and word decoding skill (nonsense word…

This longitudinal study investigates whether rural adolescents who transition to a new school in sixth grade have higher levels of risky behavior than adolescents who transition in seventh grade. Our findings indicate that later school transitions had little effect on problem behavior between sixth and ninth grades. Cross-sectional analyses found…