Getting Ahead by Staying Behind: An Evaluation of Florida’s Program to End Social Promotion

Policy, Review Finds

October 10, 2006

For Immediate Release

Education Research and Practice

(248)444-7071 (e-mail) greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org

Derek Briggs, University of Colorado at Boulder

(303)492-6320 (e-mail) Derek.Briggs@colorado.edu

EAST LANSING, Mich. (Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2006) — A recent Manhattan

Institute report which concludes that Florida’s policy of retaining third-grade

students based on their scores on a standardized reading test has helped them to

improve their reading overstates the effect of retention on student achievement

according to a Think Twice review of the report by Derek Briggs of University of

Colorado.

The report, “Getting Farther Ahead by Staying Behind: A

Second-Year Evaluation of Florida’s Policy to End Social Promotion,” by Jay

Greene and Marcus Winters reaches findings that “are best described as

suggestive and merit further investigation” according to Briggs. In his review,

he points out some principal shortcomings which undermine the validity of the

report’s conclusions:

The Florida policy doesn’t simply ‘retain’ third-graders

who fail to achieve the threshold score in the state reading test, in the way

the term is commonly understood. In addition to repeating the same grade,

Florida’s policy also requires retained students to attend summer school and

receive intensive remedial reading instruction. The authors are unable to

isolate the effect of repeating the same grade from the effect of attending

summer school and of receiving intensive reading instruction.

While using methods that appear to be appropriate, the

authors “omit important information necessary to understand and evaluate”

their statistical models, including important descriptive statistics about the

samples of students analyzed in the study.

The authors appear to overstate the retention effect

that their report estimates. This is due to the way they quantify the

magnitude of the results from their statistical analysis.

On the issue of other interventions that accompany

retention, Briggs says that because Greene and Winters do not isolate effects of

retention from those of summer school and intensive reading instruction, it is

very difficult to conclude whether retention itself had a positive or negative

effect.

The report is a follow-up to a 2005 report by Greene and

Winters which evaluated the first year of the Florida retention policy. This

report was analyzed in a Think Twice review by Ed Wiley who was critical of the

report’s methods and findings.

Find the 2006 Manhattan Institute report and its review by

Derek Briggs and the 2005 report and its review by Ed Wiley at: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The Think Twice project provides the public, policy makers

and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank

publications. It is a collaboration of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory

at Arizona State University and the Education and the Public Interest Center at

the University of Colorado and is funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education

Research and Practice.

The mission of

the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice is to identify,

develop, support, publish and widely disseminate empirically sound

research on education policy and practices designed to improve the quality

of public education for all students within the Great Lakes Region.

Visit the Great Lakes

Center website at: http://www.greatlakescenter.or g

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