Comment

Abstract

Lorence, Dworkin, Toenjes, and Hill have correctly identified me and my colleagues as critics of retention policies based on the evidence. But in their concluding section, they seriously misrepresent our work. They say that "proponents of social promotion would argue that the emotional hardships experienced by retained children and their parents are unnecessary because such children will mature sufficiently in a few years and will then be able to learn the required curriculum." This sounds like our summary of research on kindergarten readiness, kindergarten retention, and within-grade age effects, whereby we showed that kindergarten retention for reasons of social immaturity was unwarranted because within-grade age effects disappear. However, we explicitly distinguished kindergarten retention for reasons of immaturity from retention used as a remedy for poor academic performance. To my knowledge, no one who criticizes the effectiveness of retention as a means to improve achievement would claim that poor achievement can be overcome by [End Page 57] ignoring it. Instead, the argument would be to use instructional interventions that are more effective than repeating a grade in school.