Data reveals that students held back do not perform better the following year.
The Long Beach Unified School District is considering updating its promotion and retention policy to better serve students and reflect data findings.
Board Policy 5123 was first adopted in 1998 and initially had district reading benchmarks as the sole measure for deciding whether students were held back or moved on to the next grade. That assessment was phased out in 2018-19 because it didn’t align with the Common Core standards and expectations at that time.
There have been revisions throughout the early 2000s to add different benchmarks like grade levels and math proficiency.
According to district data presented at the May 17 board meeting, almost 10,000 LBUSD students were retained between 2007 and 2019.
Assistant Superintendent of Elementary Schools Brian Moskovitz said that given the board’s policy, this retention had “good intentions” and that interventions were put in place to support students and help them do better next year.
However, district data reveals that despite interventions, retained students don’t perform better than students who qualified for retention but were not retained.
During the 2019-20 school year, the district had begun the process of considering revisions to the policy, but it was interrupted by COVID-19. Moskovitz said that the recommendations the district had been working on before the pandemic were put on hold to focus on acceleration instead.
“[We were] not worrying as much about promotion and retention and worrying more about ‘how do we make sure all of our students are reading and all of our students are doing well in mathematics?’” Moskovitz said.
The graduation rate for retained students from 2007-2019 was 73% compared to the 80% graduation rate of non-retained students. Not-retained students also have a higher A-G completion rate (48%) than retained students (27%).
“At the moment, we were following code. We’re thinking ‘We’re doing what’s right by kids’ and now we’re looking at data years later and seeing that maybe it didn’t have the impact that we would hope and we hadn’t maybe considered the long-term impact,” Moskovitz said.
However, despite the negative impact of retention, the district still needs to have a retention policy, as per the state education code.
“We’ve engaged with a lot of our community, including parents and teachers and administrators, to think about what might it look like to do something that still aligns to our [education] code, but actually allows us to be more intentional and look at ways to support our students,” Moskovitz said.
The proposed revisions to the policy mainly attempt to ensure that if a student needs to be retained, there has to have been extensive work and interventions provided before that decision, according to Moskovitz.
The district worked alongside teachers, principals and parents to get feedback and recommendations on how to improve the policy.
Some of these recommendations include:
- Updating criteria to include multiple measures and include historical and diagnostic data
- Moving from one reading benchmark assessment to multiple measures of student achievement
- Following the Education Code and retaining only in grades 2-5, not first grade
- Increase data collection and monitoring
The board will vote on whether to revise the retention policy at their next meeting on July 7.
“I think this is a great improvement and I look forward to seeing a policy being brought for us to consider,” board President Diana Craighead said. “It also underscores the fact that we need to be monitoring our policies to make sure that they are up to date and still serve the needs of our students.”
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