There’s something more. Retention isn’t popular with parents. It’s expensive, too. As a result, schools generally don’tstudents to repeat a year. Sometimes, the response is to grant exemptions, some more thoughtful than others . Better, though, is for schools to react by preventing students from missing cutoffs in the first place: committing to early detection of students’ struggles as well as early attempts to address them.
students who aren’t. Yet it’s vital to recognize that none of this improvement, by retained students or students allowed to continue to the next grade, occurs thanks to retention alone.In Mississippi, literacy coaches have been painstakingly selected, trained and monitored by the state and dispatched to perform one job: supporting teachers as they learn, and learn to teach, the science of reading. Teacher preparation programs have evolved to encompass these methods.
Retention done right might be part of the comprehensive strategy needed to catch up kids after school shutdowns from covid-19. More time will yield more answers, as students subject to this decade’s policies move into high school and beyond. Yet retention done absent such a strategy is retention done wrong — and it might hurt more than it helps.