No, retention does not reduce the dropout rate

The headline was enticing:

"Repeating a grade can help reduce dropout rate, study says."

We were naturally intrigued. Decades of research has established a very different conclusion: In most cases, retention works to the educational and psychological detriment of the student.

Any study showing otherwise may help point the way to retention strategies that actually work. So we read on:

"Researchers found that more than 80 percent of the students who repeated second grade improved their command of English and knowledge of math, independent of other risk factors such as poverty or speaking English as a second language," Fox News Latino reported. "More than 63 percent of English-speaking Hispanic students above the federal poverty level who repeated second grade achieved a permanent command of English, while the figure for Latino kids from poor Spanish-speaking households is 64 percent."

That all sounded good. But where was the substantiation of the headline?

We went to the study.

And as it turns out, there's absolutely nothing in the report connecting retention to reduced dropout rates. In fact, the authors specifically note that that their data was limited early primary results, with no way to say whether the moderate gains would hold over time. "The longer-term outcome are uncertain," they wrote.

As we increasingly direct our national focus toward the fight to end the dropout epidemic, we must be careful not to jump to conclusions about what works and what doesn't. Every time we make a decision based on poor information, we run the risk of creating gravely negative impacts to a student's life. And in this fight, not every step back can be reversed by a step forward.