Report Overstates Impact of Florida Retention Policy, Review Finds

October 10, 2006

For Immediate Release

Contact: Teri Battaglieri, Great Lakes Center for 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.