Think Twice Weekly Report

Grade Retention

Source: Fordham Institute

Date: 10/11/2023

Think Again: Is grade retention bad for kids?

For many years, the conventional wisdom in the field was that grade retention was a bad idea. A 1997 opinion piece in Education Week titled "Grade retention doesn't work" reflected the prevailing sentiment in the education community and the available research evidence at that time: retained students performed worse than their promoted peers in the years that followed.[1] This brief challenges that notion, based on more recent studies that do a better job of isolating the causal effect of retention.

Student Enrollment

Source: Brookings Institute

Date: 10/12/2023

Declining school enrollment since the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has had dramatic effects on the learning experiences and academic performance of children as well as on parents, teachers, and schools. Recent investigations have documented large declines in K-12 student enrollment in public schools at the state and district levels after the COVID-19 pandemic (Dee and Murphy 2021, Musaddiq et al. 2022, Dee 2023). However, state- or district-level evidence on enrollment declines may obscure how these losses vary for different types of public schools, such as by grade level and by the characteristics of the community. As more post-pandemic data are reported, a clearer picture of the nationwide declines and their implications for students and public school systems emerges. In this paper, we investigate how student enrollment in public schools is different after the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study goes beyond some of the previous explorations in four important ways. First, we use U.S. Census Bureau data to estimate the number of school-age children in each district and infer the number of students not attending public school prior to and after COVID-19. Second, we document the enrollment trajectories in typical (i.e., median) schools in each grade level, locale, and socioeconomic status. Third, we show variation in enrollment changes across schools by looking at the distribution of enrollment changes during the pandemic. Finally, we compare the distribution of enrollment changes during COVID-19 to those from the pre-pandemic years to infer typical and extraordinary enrollment declines.

Review of The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice Programs in America, 2023 Edition

Source: EdChoice

Reviewed by: Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University

The 2023 (fifth) edition of a semi-regular EdChoice report about school-choice studies is billed as an updated overview of the varied and often contested research on outcomes in voucher-like programs that provide public funding for private schools. But like earlier editions, it uses flawed methods that tally certain voucher studies finding impacts on any subgroup, even if there was no effect on most students. There is little to no accounting for the studies' sampling, quality, generalizability, or other important factors.

Christopher Lubienski of Indiana University reviewed The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice Programs in America, 2023 Edition and found fault in its study-selection issues, a mis-weighting of studies of varied value, and a simplistic and often misleading design.

People Power Vs. the Far Right Education Movement

By: Glenn Diagon, The Progressive Magazine

Democracy Forward's Skye Perryman talks about how to fight back against the far right's movement to undermine public education.

GreatLakesCenter.org