Study challenges wisdom of holding back students

A new study by a education professor Elizabeth Graue challenges the conventional wisdom about the value of ‘redshirting’ children by delaying their entry into kindergarten or of asking them to repeat a grade in K-3.

The study was conducted by Graue and James DiPerna of Lehigh University. They examined the records of more than 8,500 Wisconsin students in 47 districts to determine patterns of school entry, promotion, subsequent special services and student achievement.

About 7 percent of kindergartners in the sample were redshirted, and 3 percent were asked to repeat a K-3 grade. Redshirters tend to be relatively young boys, and children retained are typically children of color and of poverty.

“Based on what we found in our study,” says Graue, “redshirting for kindergarten or retention in the early grades should not be widely promoted or endorsed until we know more.”

Within her study and other such studies:

• Students do not seem to benefit socially from being redshirted. Their self-concept and acceptance by peers are about the same as those who were not redshirted. In fact, redshirts do less well than their peers on measures of behavior problems. Graue does not argue that redshirting causes social and emotional difficulty, but that it does not appear to solve social or emotional problems.
• Redshirters are 1.89 times more likely to need exceptional educational needs (EEN) services. That finding contradicts the belief that redshirting will head off the need for extra support for the child. Indeed, some children who are “held out” miss receiving needed school-based attention in learning, cognitive and emotional disabilities.
• Redshirted kindergartners perform on par with – but not above, as some would predict – their grade-level peers, but children retained in the early grades perform below their grade peers.

The findings from Graue’s study will be published in the American Educational Research Journal this summer.