RESEARCH

Summer School and Staying Back Benefit Younger Kids

When you combine summer school and being held back, third graders benefit, but sixth graders don’t. That’s one of the conclusions that Kennedy School assistant professor Brian Jacob came to, along with Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University, after examining the records of approximately 148,000 third and sixth graders in Chicago public schools.

The study, which appears in the current issue of the Review of Economics and Statistics and received a flurry of mainstream media attention in March, flies against conventional wisdom about the benefits of these two programs, which are meant to help students who are struggling academically.

“Despite their popularity, these practices — particularly grade retention — remain controversial, ” Jacob and Lefgren write. “Prior research suggests that summer school has a substantial positive effect on student learning in the short-term, but there is less evidence regarding the sustainability of achievement gains made during the summer. In contrast, the majority of retention studies find that the practice of requiring students to repeat a grade decreases self-esteem, school adjustment, and academic achievement, and increases dropout rates.”

The problem with these past studies, Jacob and Lefgren say, is that they don’t take into account the fact that the students who go into these programs are not chosen randomly — they are self selected, either because they or their parents are motivated to do better, or because the school gives them no choice. In addition, these past studies have had to compare apples and oranges: poor performing students who are held back or who attend summer school and their peers who were not held back and are performing at a higher level.

Jacob and Lefgren, however, had raw data to work with that allowed them to compare very similar groups. Starting in 1996, their test city, Chicago, created a policy that ended automatic promotion. Students were no longer advanced into the next grade regardless of their skills or academic performance. The policy had a big impact. From 1997 to 1999, based on test scores, 10 to 20 percent of students were held back and 30,000 third gradersand 21,000 sixth graders were sent to mandatory summer school. Jacob and Lefgren were able to compare this test group — those who just missed passing the test-score cutoff — with those who just passed the test.

The overall comparison results were mixed, says Jacob, who explains that they looked at the combined effect of summer school and retention on third and sixth graders, as well as the impact that each program had separately (see chart).

The authors noted that the Chicago students were tested in the context of high-stakes testing so there were added incentives for them to do well so that they would not have to attend summer school or be held back.

To read the full study, go to Jacob’s Web site at ksghome.harvard.edu/~.bjacob.academic.ksg/jacob_papers.htm.