Chapter 2: Dropout in Relation to Grade Retention:An Accounting from the Beginning School Study⁰⁰¹

This paper examines the relationship between retention in the primary grades and high school dropout from the perspective of the Beginning School Study (BSS), a panel of Baltimore school children who attended first grade in 20 city public schools in the fall of 1982.⁰⁰² It extends our earlier work on effects of grade retention (e.g., Alexander, Entwisle, & Dauber, 1994), which investigated consequences for children’s academic performance and socioemotional development through the middle school years.

When children are not keeping up, is it better to hold them back or move them ahead? That is the question addressed in our earlier work. For answers, we examined the experience of 1st grade repeaters, 2nd grade repeaters, 3rd grade repeaters and, as a group, children held back in grades four through seven, monitoring their academic progress and attitudes from the beginning of first grade, before anyone had been held back, to the end of seventh grade (in the case of repeaters) or eighth grade (in the case of children never retained). The time frame was eight years in both instances, but with repeaters a grade (or more) behind their never retained age-mates.