The Effect of Grade Retention on Child Test Scores

Each year an estimated two million children in the United States repeat a grade. Investing an additional year in the same grade is expected to help a child to acquire the academic skills she lacks. This, in turn, would help her to be successful in higher grades. In spite of its popularity, grade retention remains a highly controversial practice. A majority of researchers find that repeating a grade is strongly correlated with the poor performance in test scores of repeaters. In this paper I examine whether repeating a grade adds value to the academic performance of repeaters as measured by their improvement in mathematics and reading test scores. I focus on retention in grades one to five. I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Child Survey. Using a difference-in-difference propensity score matching estimator I find that repeating a grade does not lead to an improvement in a repeaters' performance in these tests. On contrary, repeating a grade adversely affects their performance in these tests.