Archive | March, 2026

Grade Retention is Bad Education Policy

22 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/22/2026

Twenty-six American states have a mandatory third-grade retention policy for students who do not pass the state’s reading exam and Maryland is set to implement that policy in 2027. According to researchers, this is bad thinking based on intuition not science. Writing for Education Trust, Brittney Davis declared, “The research is clear that grade retention is not effective over time, and it is related to many negative academic, social, and emotional outcomes for students — especially students of color who have been retained.”  

Economist Jiee Zhong won her PhD from Texas A&M in 2024 and is now an assistant professor of economics at the University of Miami. Last year, she just finished a very impressive study on the effects of grade retention for Texas third graders. Texas abandoned mandatory third-grade retention in 2009.

Zhong studied outcomes of third-graders from 2002-03, 2003-04 and 2004-05 school years who took the Texas reading exam that carried retention consequences. This large data set allowed her to use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to extract many results. By 2024, the students studied were all young adults over 26 years of age. She was able to evaluate their education, social and economic outcomes using powerful math techniques.

Zhong concluded:

“I find that third-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation.”

For one outcome, she investigated a group of students who barely passed or barely failed the reading test. She learned that the barely failing students earn $1,682 (11.3%) less at age 23 than the barely passing students. Zhong noted that 64.2% of barely passing students graduated from high school while just 55.1% of the barely failing students graduated. She observed that both of these results were statistically significant at a 5% level.

Zhong also noticed a racial disparity. She reports, “White students experience a sharp 43.8 percentage point decline in high school graduation probability, higher than the reductions for Black (17.6 percentage points) and Hispanic students (0.6 percentage points).”

These results from 2025 add more weight to similar results that previous researchers have reported.

The Retention Illusion

In January 2025, Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina published a linked series of three policy briefs concerning grade retention by Claire Xia and Elizabeth Glennie, Ph.D. The Duke researchers stated, “The majority of published studies and decades of research indicate that there is usually little to be gained, and much harm that may be done through retaining students in grade.”

They also mention the grade retention illusion is held by many community members, administrators and teachers who believe grade retention is helpful and needed. The Duke researchers stated, “The findings that retention is ineffective or even harmful in the long run seem counterintuitive.” This belief is so strong that on the 31st Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallop Poll, 72% of the public favor stricter promotion standards even if significantly more students would be held back. Other studies show the public being strongly opposed to social promotion believing low-achieving students will continue to fall farther behind.

Teachers also are susceptible to misunderstanding the effect of grade-retention. Because they only know of the performance of students in the following year, they are blind to the damage being done. The retained students seem to do well the next year and they are unaware of the long-term student trajectories after retention. Therefore, retention often looks successful to many teachers.

Teacher observations of a student’s improved achievement the second time around leads to this erroneous success belief. Xia and Glennie observe:

“These comparisons lead to the false conclusions that children benefit from retention. In contrast, studies comparing the retained student to a similar student who was promoted suggest that retained students would have made just as much or even more progress without retention.”

EdWeek reporter Sarah Schwartz shared that Professor Shane Jimerson of the University of California Santa Barbara published one of the most-cited research papers on grade retention in 2001.

Jimerson performed a meta-analysis of 20 studies published between 1990 and 1999. He concluded that they “fail to demonstrate that grade retention provides greater benefits to students with academic or adjustment difficulties than does promotion to the next grade.” In many studies, students who were retained had worse academic achievement and social-emotional outcomes than students who were not.

I did find one study funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and written by David N. Figlio & Umut Özek that was very positive about Florida’s third-grade retention program. In the abstract Figlio & Özek state:

“We find that retention in the third-grade substantially improves the English skills of these students, reducing the time to proficiency by half and decreasing the likelihood of taking a remedial English course in middle school by one-third. Grade retention also roughly doubles the likelihood of taking an advanced course in math and science in middle school, and more than triples the likelihood of taking college credit-bearing courses in high school for English learners.”

Florida’s retention program required retained students to be given 90-minutes of reading instruction every day during their retained year. It seems that this remediation was successful but couldn’t these students have been passed and given that remediation in 4th grade and in summer school? It would have been better financially for the state and better emotionally for the students.

In a recent post, my friend Nancy Bailey raised a similar idea writing:

“Retention always raises questions about whether children may need more time between kindergarten and third grade to learn, perhaps being pushed to read too soon. What if they hadn’t been retained and had received intensive reading instruction throughout? Fourth grade is not an insignificant year for learning to read better.”

Conclusion

Unfortunately, third-grade retention has become politicized. It is viewed as an essential element of the science of reading which is not scientifically based but does generate profit potential.

Billionaires like John Arnold are adept at making big money, in his case with Enron, but do not understand education. Yet, they continue spending to implement often benighted education policies.

Third-grade retention is another such policy which they do not understand, but their immense wealth too often overrides education common sense.

After taking a deep dive into retention effects, I can find no way to justify it. It is much worse than I imagined and expensive. The Duke policy briefs states:

“It is estimated that nationally 5% to 9% of students are retained every year, translating into over 2.4 million children annually. With an average per pupil expenditure of over $7,500 a year, this common practice of retention costs taxpayers over 18 billion dollars every year.”

What has been widely known since at least the 1990s is that retention is harmful for students. As the title of Nancy Bailey’s post referenced above states, “Grade Retention: The Debate Had Its Day, Now End It!”

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The AI Education Grift

9 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/9/2026

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a billionaire driven con job. In the early 20th century, eugenicists claimed they could improve the human condition by measuring general intelligence and eliminating the bad genetics associated with dense people. Their unsavory ideology posited a racial hierarchy based on faulty intelligence testing. Still today, researchers have never found a reliable way to measure intelligence. The concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) rests in part on a belief that intelligence can be measured. It is science fiction that is unlikely to ever exist but there is money to be made. Unsurprisingly, tech billionaires are invading America’s schools to advance their latest scam while teachers are busy “AI-proofing” classrooms.

Google announced an AI training for “all six million K-12 teachers and higher education faculty.” They have signed a three-year agreement with ISTE+ASCD to carry out the training using Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM tools.

Benjamin Riley, who founded the think tank Cognitive Resonance, believes the Google partnership is part of an ongoing process making ISTE+ASCD a “shill” for Big Tech. He predicted that much of the training will end up “wasting teachers’ time, Google’s money and ISTE+ASCD’s relevance.”

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) began as a part of the National Education Association (NEA) in 1943. In 1972, they separated from the NEA. ISTE was founded in 1979. In the 1980s, ISTE worked on developing education technology standards. In 2015, the national education technology standards were renamed the “ISTE Standards.” In 2023, ISTE and ASCD merged forming ISTE+ASCD. It is the relevance of this organization that Riley claims will be destroyed by their signing the Google training contract.

This past July, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced $23 million in funding from Open AI, Anthropic and Microsoft for a National Academy of AI Instruction to train up to 400,000 educators. The new entity will train teachers “on how to use AI tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.” University of Mississippi researcher, Mark Watkins, described this announcement as “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.”

Technology and education critique Audrey Watters says, “unions should be one of the ways in which workers resist, rather than acquiesce to … the tech industry’s vision of the future.” By joining forces with big tech, AFT is implicitly endorsing its products. Watters continued, “Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools is not so much an ‘academy’ as a storefront.”

Or as Ben Riley wryly put it, “Google and ISTE+ASCD announce new partnership to destroy US education.”

Middle School Students Not Learning Science

In every corner of the United States, people want their children to have a world class education. As a result, throughout the country spending on education is huge. The lords of Silicon Valley are desperate to make AI profitable and see education technology as possible source of big profits. They don’t give a damn about educating children but really want to sell AI no matter how useless or even harmful it may be for education.

Bums Rush for AI

Ted Gioia writes a popular blog about culture. In a post last July, he noted:

“AI is now bundled into all of my Microsoft software.

“Even worse, Microsoft recently raised the price of its subscriptions by $3 per month to cover the additional AI benefits. I get to use my AI companion 60 times per month as part of the deal.”

“Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily—just 8% according to a recent survey. So they need to bundle it with some other essential product.”

This is a big dilemma for the tech masters. A huge amount of Wall Street money is being poured into AI but profits are not there and maybe never will be. The investors want to see a return.

AI technology is very expensive and environmentally destructive. It is estimated that data centers will consume 1,580 terawatt-hours a year by 2034. One terawatt hour is the equivalent energy of a billion kilowatt hours. The associated data centers are also water hogs. At ChatGPT, for every 5 to 50 responses, two cups of water are consumed. With daily customer usage in the millions, that is a lot of water. (The AI Con – Page 159)

A known high school Spanish teacher and author from Indiana, Matt Miller, says what teachers get from AI company training is over-the-top talk about “how much the world is going to change and how we’re revolutionizing education.” The trainers never address the fact that most students use generative AI for “cognitive offloading.”

I was in the classroom when internet use first exploded on the scene. Within a couple years, I was getting beautifully written physics-problem solutions from most of my students. I soon discovered that there were worked out examples of almost all physics problems available on-line. That particular group of students did not learn the material and did poorly on AP testing. I am quite certain that AI in school will be even more detrimental to learning.

AI, when demonstrated by technology salesmen, is akin to magic. There is a reason a magician never reveals how their tricks work. In the same vein, no AI sentience exists and is not likely to ever exist but claims of AI sentience exist. These fictitious claims endorse thinking about the nature of intelligence that is based in eugenics and race science. (The AI Con – Pages 22-23)

Watters claims, “schools must do everything in their power to protect their faculty, staff, and students from the eugenicists and the fascists and the ‘anti-Woke’ mobs.”

Justin Reich wrote in the Conversation, “At MIT, I study the history and future of education technology, and I have never encountered an example of a school system – a country, state or municipality – that rapidly adopted a new digital technology and saw durable benefits for their students.”

Watters added:

“So why exactly are we rushing into this whole ‘AI literacy’ thing? I mean, other than the obvious grift, of course.”

Closing Remarks

AI stands for artificial intelligence which is a fraud. There is no intelligence; artificial or otherwise. A huge amount of data—most of it stolen—is run through computer-based algorithms. Much like a plastic extruding machine creates products, these algorithms are word, number and image extruding machines. In their book “The AI Con,” professors Emily Bender and Alex Hana labeled LLMs like ChatGPT “synthetic text extruding machines”. (The AI Con – Page 31) That is a much more accurate and descriptive name than AI.

Some community college districts in California have spent millions on AI-chatbots to help students navigate admissions, financial aid and campus services. Unfortunately, the chatbots do not provide clear and accurate answers.

This points to the same reason; I never trust AI for an internet search because AI makes mistakes. The spending on AI is gargantuan and it is still not reliable. Some of these issues may be overcome but it will never be good at education.

Do we really want to encourage children to use facilities that generates AI child sexual abuse material? Last year, a Stanford Cyber Policy Report stated:

“In this report we aim to understand how educators, platform staff, law enforcement officers, U.S. legislators, and victims are thinking about and responding to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

“Our main findings are that while the prevalence of student-on-student nudify app use in schools is unclear, schools are generally not addressing the risks of nudify apps with students, and some schools that have had a nudify incident have made missteps in their response.”

AI is dangerous, not accurate and I believe it will harm education. There is just no reason for America’s schools to rush into this technology. And when schools do adopt AI, let that adoption be guided by educators and not by technology salesmen.

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