Nearly 6 percent of students in Texas repeat the first grade...

This is alarming.... -Angela

July 23, 2006, 1:05PM
READING STRUGGLES
FIRST GRADE, SECOND TRY
Nearly 6 percent of students in Texas repeat the first grade, raising costs and controversy

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

Youngsters headed to first grade next month shouldn't take the assignment lightly: A whopping 1 in 9 students at some Houston schools won't earn his way into second grade.

Statewide, 6 percent of first-graders not in special education are held back annually — roughly twice the retention rate of any other elementary or middle school grade. And the percentage of failing first-graders has reached double digits in about 80 of Texas' 1,040 school districts, including Pasadena, Aldine and Houston, according to a 2005 state report.

Holding back nearly 21,000 Texas first-graders cost the state roughly $185 million in 2004-05.

"It is expensive, and it's a problem. We've got to find ways of addressing and meeting their needs," said Pasadena Superintendent Kirk Lewis, whose district's 12.4 percent first-grade retention rate is among the highest in Harris County.

The reason for the first-grade logjam is simple: Too many children — particularly those from poor families — arrive unprepared to do the work, struggle to read and are unable to catch up with their peers in one school year, experts said. Free prekindergarten programs for children from low-income families so far have seemingly failed to reverse that trend. And some researchers and educators are questioning the wisdom of Texas' hard-line stance against social promotion.

Making sure students succeed in the first grade — where they tackle the fundamentals of reading — could be critical in Texas' lowering its high school dropout rate and meeting federal achievement standards. High school dropouts are five times more likely to have repeated a grade than graduates; students who are retained twice almost always end up dropping out, according to national research.


Numerous goals

First grade isn't exactly child's play.
A 38-page curriculum asks youngsters to identify rhymes; use patterns to count by twos, fives and tens; observe and record the weather; create calendars; and identify historical figures who have exemplified good citizenship — among numerous other objectives.

Some districts expect students to read about 60 words a minute by the end of the year — a feat that trips up many. To solve the problem of high retention rates, schools need to find more effective ways of teaching children to read, experts said.

"We keep looking at the failure rate and acting like it's a problem with the children when it's a problem with the system," said Marion Blank, co-director of the developmental neuropsychiatry program at Columbia University and author of The Reading Remedy.

Blank called the double-digit failure rates of some Houston school districts "absolutely an alarm bell."

Much like dropouts, students who are retained in first grade in Texas are about twice as likely to be poor, male and either black or Hispanic than they are to be affluent, female and Anglo or Asian.

Those statistics hold true in the Houston Independent School District, where 93 percent of students who repeated the first grade in 2003-04 qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Black students in that first grade were four times as likely as white students to be retained; Hispanic students were three times as likely.

One-third of the 1,752 HISD students who repeated first grade in 2003-04 had been enrolled in the school district's prekindergarten program three years earlier.

Statewide, districts with above-average poverty rates, including Houston, Aldine and North Forest, also have above-average retention rates. Students who come from poor families are less likely to know their letters or numbers before they arrive on campus.

"A lot of our students come to school without the life experiences," said Wanda Bamberg, assistant superintendent of the Aldine school district, which held back 11.1 percent of its first-graders in 2004-05. "They come in with considerable gaps."


Social promotion issue

School districts are adding summer programs, extending the school day and rethinking how they teach reading to try to help these struggling 6- and 7-year-olds. But when the efforts fail, teachers are faced with one of the most controversial decisions in education: whether to hold the child back a grade or "socially promote" struggling students to keep them with their peers.
Educators on either side of the social promotion debate can point to studies that appear to back their opinion.

"It's the classic pendulum, and over the last 30 years it has swung back and forth," said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of On the Success of Failure.

According to Alexander's research, first-grade retention rates reached 15.3 percent for the District of Columbia in 1979-80 and 20 percent for Arizona in 1985-86. In the 1990s, first-grade retention rates in the 19 states that Alexander surveyed ranged from Vermont's 1.9 percent to Washington, D.C.'s 12.9 percent. Texas was in the middle of the pack.

But Texas' rate has been on the rise. It increased 20 percent — from 5 percent in 1997-98 to 6 percent in 2004-05. And the 61 school districts in the Houston region have seen a 20 percent jump in their rate since the mid-1990s.

"There's now a desire not to promote kids to the next level if they don't have the skills to go to the next level. That's really different than it was 10 years ago," said Karen Soehnge, the Houston school district's chief academic officer.


Presidents favor retention

Over the past decade, former President Clinton, President George W. Bush and other politicians have championed retention, saying it's a better option than promoting students before they're ready. As Texas governor, Bush pushed for laws that now require students at certain grade levels (but not first grade) to pass state exams before moving on.
Yet studies have repeatedly shown that students who are retained never catch up academically and are more likely to misbehave, dislike school and feel badly about themselves than other students, according to the National Association of School Psychologists.

La Porte grandmother Sharon Sims cried as she considered sending her grandson Roger Hight back to first grade last fall.

Even though he had been promoted, Roger's first month in the second grade at College Park Elementary was miserable. Teachers kept him out of physical education and other fun classes so that he could spend more time learning to read. In September, she decided her grandson should be moved back.

"Oh my gosh, I cried. I knew he needed it, but it was tough," Sims said. "I felt like I was a failure. He was not understanding how to read at all."

A year later, Sims said she's sure she made the right decision. Even though her grandson's older than most of his classmates, he's now in much better shape academically.

Some educators say that if a child must be held back, it's better to do it in kindergarten, first or second grade.

"There's an informal rule that earlier is better," said Jason Downer, a research scientist at the University of Virginia with expertise in the transition into first grade.

A study by University of Houston sociology professor Gary Dworkin showed that students who were held back because they failed Texas' standardized test went on to greater academic and social success.

"Higher retention rates, when it's done very early, ends up to be somewhat beneficial to the kids, as opposed to doing nothing or to socially promoting them and hoping they pick up the material," Dworkin said.

"The best we could say is that it was not harmful in ways that earlier studies conveyed," Dworkin said. "Retention is expensive. If a child continues through 12th grade, it's an additional year of public schooling. It also means schools will grow in size simply because some portion of kids don't move on."

But other studies concluded that children who are held back in early grades eventually suffer.

Students retained during a two-decade study in Baltimore didn't show short-term effects of repeating a grade, but they still tended to drop out out of high school at much higher rates than their classmates, Alexander said.

He encourages schools to look at creative options including "partial promotion" — keeping students with their peer group in most subjects but providing remediation in the subjects that are troubling.


A successful program

In 1993-94, Texas piloted a $5 million Retention Reduction Program to try to help 10,000 struggling first-graders. After the students in the program spent an extra month in the summer receiving intense remediation, 92 percent of them were ready for second grade.
The program cost $517 per student, a small fraction of what it costs to send them back to first grade.

Because of its success, the state now offers extra funding to schools that provide summer classes to elementary-age students.

The La Porte school district launched a summer academy for first-graders this year. About 50 students — some of whom were being promoted and some of whom were being held back — spent the month working on phonics, vocabulary and comprehension.

Eight-year-old Cory Snyder said the extra class time was a big help.

"Reading was pretty hard for me when I started," said Cory, who will start second grade at College Park in August. "I used to get worse at it, but I kept trying."

Despite the initiative, Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said the state is concerned that the retention rate is creeping back up.

She thinks educators might be more willing to hold students back early to better prepare them for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, which students must pass to be promoted from the third and fifth grades.


HISD's strict policy

HISD leaders say their retention rates are higher than average — 10.2 percent for first-graders — because they've spelled out even more stringent promotion standards.
To pass first grade, HISD students must earn at least a 70 percent in their course work, pass a reading exam of common words and score within at least one grade level on the Stanford 9 Achievement Test of their actual placement.

"We're using a different standard in HISD," Soehnge said. "We will have a higher retention rate as a result."

HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said HISD's strict policy is good for children.

"Some of the researchers disagree, but many agree that social promotion is bad for kids, and retaining them and making sure they learn the material is important," he said.

Even with the higher standards, though, Soehnge said HISD hopes to make sure that every youngster who qualifies — those who come from poor families or who are learning English — has a spot in a full-day prekindergarten program.

"I really believe over time, we'll be able to lower those retention rates," she said.

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com

This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/4065585.html