Held Back Getting Drop On Retention Schools Come To Grips With Holding Back Slow Learners
It will remain a family secret.
Marilyn’s 7-year-old boy never will know his teacher wanted him to repeat first grade.
What Marilyn calls her “worst nightmare,” educators call retention. To the less politically correct, it’s plain old flunking.
The Nine Mile Falls mother vows it won’t happen to her son, despite warnings he’s immature and doesn’t read nearly as well as his classmates.
“It’s practically consumed my life,” said Marilyn, who didn’t want her last name published because she fears humiliating her family.
“I think it would devastate him. He’s a child who desperately wants to belong.”
Not all parents think repeating a grade would trash their children’s chances for happiness or academic success. But the mere mention of retention makes many wince.
Once lovingly dubbed “a gift of time,” retention is accused of raising dropout rates and lowering self-esteem. It’s pitted parents against teachers and children against classmates. It’s the reason veteran teachers recall boys with beards driving themselves to seventh grade.
Besides all that, critics say the retention scales tip in favor of girls and white kids. Boys and children of color are held back far more often.
But the study that stands out in Technicolor for teachers is one placing retention among children’s top anxieties. It was outranked only by fears of blindness and the death of a parent.
Yet in many communities, including Spokane County and North Idaho, more and more parents will hear the words “Your child isn’t ready to move to the next grade.”
In Washington, teachers who’ve been letting kids march to the beat of their own drummers are realizing they’ll soon have to keep time with new state assessments.
Nationwide, pressure for tougher academic standards is coming from the top, with President Clinton calling for plans to make sure all students can read before leaving third grade. Businesses and colleges cheer him on, complaining they often get stuck teaching kids the basics themselves.
Jim Grant, a former New Hampshire principal and retention advocate, says the real reason administrators reject retention is money. Taxpayers fork over an extra $5,000 or so in state and local money every time a student repeats a grade.
“We’re in serious trouble because we tried to say no child can be retained,” he said. “I think that’s a morally wrong position.”
The results? More discipline problems, Grant said. More students labeled learning disabled. More kids who can’t spell, write in cursive, recite multiplication tables.
Now Grant predicts a retention revolution.
Making a comeback
In Washington, where retention largely has been blacklisted, the pendulum is beginning to swing, said Larry Swift, executive director of the Washington State School Directors Association.
“We have to decide what to do with students who can’t meet the standards,” said Swift. “Retention is part of the answer. I think it is the next big, big policy issue we’ll have to address.”
In Spokane School District 81, teachers refer to retention as “the R word” and have slashed the number of students held back in the past decade. But even here, educators plan to take a second look at whether they should retain kids more often.
In the Coeur d’Alene School District, Hazel Bauman, director of elementary education, predicts a gradual return to retention. Now only about 10 out of 4,000 elementary students are held back each year.
“We are starting to use it once in awhile,” Bauman said, “especially with very young children.”
Several other districts, from Yakima to Seattle, already are sending home the message that children won’t advance automatically anymore.
The growing interest in retention makes some longtime educators anxious - even Terry Bergeson, Washington state Superintendent of Public Instruction. Before taking the top education post in January, she helped create the new assessments, or tests, as part of the state’s education reform plan.
All fourth-graders will take the tests next year, and students in grades seven and 10 will be phased in by the 2000-2001 school year.
Individual districts will decide what happens with kids who fail the assessments. So far, there are no state sanctions, said Gordon Ensign, assessment director for the state Commission on Student Learning.
One thing is sure, Ensign said. Students must pass the 10th-grade assessment before graduating.
Now Bergeson cringes at a haunting mental vision. “I have this picture of kids piling up in the fourth grade.”
Spokane’s flip-flop on the philosophy of retention is strikingly clear. A decade ago, teachers held back more than 10 times as many kids as they do now.
Spokane School District records show 233 elementary students were retained in 1986. Last year, just 22 of the district’s 36,000 students were held back. Teachers retained only 14 children in 1993.
Students were held back at 28 Spokane elementary schools a decade ago, compared with 10 schools last year.
Willard Elementary School did the most dramatic about-face. Teachers at the school on West Longfellow retained 33 children in 1986 - more than any Spokane school. In the past two years, they retained none.
And Principal Gene Wooley is thrilled. “I’ve gone full swing,” he said.
He began changing his mind on the issue when an informal study of Willard’s problem kids showed many had been held back.
“By the time the kids got up to sixth grade, they were taller than the teacher and were shaving,” Wooley said. “Their hormones were growing, and they were getting to be young adults. They’d end up discipline problems.”
About the same time, all Spokane principals were getting a similar message from a District 81 committee that studied retention, which usually is reserved for elementary students. Its final recommendation, published in 1989, was clear: “Retention is an inappropriate intervention for children.”
Schools even closed popular “pre-first” classrooms for kindergartners whose teachers said they weren’t ready for first grade.
At first, teacher Karen Sands-Wichman was disappointed. She was sure she’d helped kids catch up in her pre-first classroom. But now she quotes studies she says proved her wrong.
“For only a handful did it make a real difference,” said Sands-Wichman, now a second-grade teacher at Bemiss Elementary.
Now she compares her slow learners to flowers blooming at different rates and says teachers need to adjust. “I don’t think you can force a child to be at a level. I know the teachers have done a lot more adapting.”
Schools across the country were changing their philosophies on retention, too. In 1990, the Texas Board of Education barred state districts from retaining students in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten. The same year, Massachusetts’ education department advised districts to stop the practice, and Florida lawmakers adopted a measure encouraging districts to abolish retention in early grades.
Living with the effects
Lots of research backed up those changes.
Sophomores who’d repeated at least one previous grade were at twice the risk of dropping out as their peers, according to a 1987 study by the U.S. Department of Education.
Other studies showed academic gains made by retained students wear off quickly and that watching classmates move ahead blasts kids’ self-esteem.
Not all the research has been negative. A 1994 study showed retained kids developed greater attachment to school and got in less trouble. Researchers suspect the children enjoy a higher status among their younger classmates.
Others suggest retention doesn’t cause dropout, but both stem from a predisposition to problem behavior.
One Spokane mother expects her daughter’s outlook on school to improve when she repeats eighth grade next year.
“Her attitude was more or less giving up on school,” said Melinda Byers, who asked Salk Middle School teachers to retain her daughter, 13.
“I feel holding her back’s going to help her a lot. She’ll be ready to go on to high school instead of feeling like being a dropout.”
A 16-year-old Spokane girl kept back in second grade remembers younger classmates looking up to her. But she also remembers the pain of watching her best friend move on to a new set of friends.
She grew taller and more developed than her peers, and was quite popular with the boys. She dropped out anyway at 13.
“It sucked because I was older than the other kids,” she said. Now she’s back, trying to catch up at Havermale Alternative Center on West Knox.
Another girl held back in kindergarten said it didn’t bother her, even though her friends nicknamed her “Too Tall.”
As a teenager, she gave birth to two babies and missed a lot of school. Now she’s 21 and taking special classes at Havermale to get her diploma.
She doesn’t resent being held back. But, she said, “I don’t think it helped me. I never did catch up.”
Higher standards
Some educators worry there’ll be a lot more kids telling similar stories some day.
“I guarantee (retention rates) will go up in this rush to accountability,” said Ronald Areglado, a program director for the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
Districts across the nation are beefing up academic standards and tests for measuring them. And educators, nervously wondering if kids will measure up, are looking at retention as a way to help make sure they do.
Lawmakers and business leaders also are putting enormous pressure on educators to hold children to higher standards - even if that means retaining them, Areglado said.
Tests meant to pinpoint areas in which children need extra help will be used to weed out kids learning at a slower pace, he said.
“Tragically, retention becomes the quick-fix solution. You’re going to see a lot of casualties where kids are going to say, ‘I’m out of here.”’ “My prediction,” said Areglado, “is we’ll see a groundswell of lawsuits and challenges to this.”
Fran Mester will be on the front line when scores on the new state assessments start rolling in.
As Spokane’s director of instructional programs, she’ll be responsible for helping keep those scores as high as possible.
“The natural question people are asking is, ‘What do you do when you have a child who’s not demonstrating mastery?”’ said Mester.
That’s precisely why school board members have asked administrators to take another look at how retention is used in Spokane schools. Mester expects to organize a committee of parents, teachers, administrators and students who’ll do that next school year.
“I don’t have a clue yet as to where we’ll end up in terms of answers,” she said.
Associate Superintendent Cynthia Lambarth envisions a return to more retention. But she doubts that’ll damage kids’ self-confidence any more than not keeping up.
“One of the greatest boosts to self-esteem is competency,” she said.
Carol Peterson, elementary education director in Central Valley School District, said teachers there already are retaining more kids.
“A few years ago, we went through a time where you shouldn’t retain. Period. Now we try to look at each individual.”
Bergeson, Washington state superintendent, said she plans to leave decisions on retaining students to local districts. Still, she hopes they make retention a “last-ditch effort” and concentrate on solid teaching instead.
“Everybody’s focused on fourth, seventh and 10th grades,” she said. “But the real issue is what happens along the way.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo Staff illustration by Molly Quinn 2 graphics: 1) Retaining students 2) 12 steps to help failing students