History
Different schools have used different approaches throughout history. Grade retention or repetition was essentially meaningless in the one-room schoolhouses of more than a century ago, because access to outside standards were very limited, and the small scale of the school, with perhaps only a few students of each age, was conducive to individualized instruction. With the proliferation of larger, graded schools in the middle of the 19th century, retention became a common practice. In fact, a century ago, approximately half of all American students were retained at least once before the age of 13.
Social promotion began to spread in the 1930s with concerns about the psychosocial effects of retention. Social promotion is the promoting of underperforming students under the ideological principle that staying with their same-age peers is important to success. This trend reversed in the 1980s, as concern about slipping academic standards rose.
The practice of grade retention in the U.S. has been climbing steadily since the 1980s. The practice of making retention decisions on the basis of the results of a single test — called high-stakes testing — is widely condemned by professional educators. Test authors generally advise that their tests are not adequate for high-stakes decisions, and that decisions should be made based on all the facts and circumstances.
Read more about this topic: Grade Retention
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