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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