Failure -- or the threat of failure -- can lead to success
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jul 28
- 2 min read
"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully," said Samuel Johnson. Apparently, the threat of third-grade retention has a similar effect, reports Sarah Schwartz in Education Week. In Ohio, at-risk students' reading scores rose when a retention policy was adopted -- before any student is held back, according to a new working paper.
Eighteen states currently have third-grade reading "gate" on the books: Students who read below grade level are held back.
In Ohio, researchers found that third-graders "who were identified as at-risk for retention did better on end-of-year reading and math tests than students who started the year with similar reading abilities, but weren’t identified as at-risk for retention," writes Schwartz.
Reading gains persisted through seventh grade, said Sarah Souders, the lead author. She noted that the policy affected many more students than the very small number who are actually retained each year.
Ohio’s law required schools to monitor K-3 students’ progress and help students who were struggling, researchers note. School and district report cards, and some funding, were linked to third-grade reading proficiency.
Michigan's third-grade retention policy led to similar gains, from 2020-2022, writes Schartz. It was repealed in 2023. As in Ohio, "third graders who scored just below the cutoff for retention had better reading scores later on than their peers who scored just above the cutoff, even when districts didn’t actually retain any students."
Retention policies change behaviors of teachers, parents and students, Gema Zamarro, a professor in education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas, told Schwartz. Students get more instructional supports, and "parents also get the message: My kids need to improve,” she said.
It concentrates the mind.
New York City public schools retain only .4 percent of students in third through eighth grade last year, even though 40 percent test below grade level, reports David Spector in the New York Post.
The district "must do a better job communicating to families and students when they are not at grade level and stopping automatic promotion,” Danyela Egorov, a Manhattan Institute fellow, said.
"Promoting nearly all students, many who are not ready for the next grade is educational malpractice,” tweets Yiatin Chu. "Now that NYC school enrollment is declining, maybe the right thing to do is to have kids repeat a grade. School funds continue to rise and we still have a mandate to hire more teachers anyway."
Such aversive motivation is not consistent with the love of education or of reading, and perfectly exemplifies the bad policy advocacy of Americans unfamiliar with comparative education. Rather than malpractice, social promotion is standard practice in foreign states with better reading scores than any American ones; they provide struggling readers with extra support, without the harshness that misappropriating Dr Johnson's observation leads to -- or you could go all the way with your analogy, and advocate the execution of struggling third-graders, with your modest proposal.
Nevada had read by 3 until it was eliminated in the 2010's by the state legislature, but read by 3 (third grade) was re-instated and is due to start impacting students in 2028, but there has been a recent call by superintendents in school districts to get rid of it once again:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nevada-superintendents-push-back-on-retaining-third-graders-struggling-to-read
I know that some students will have issues with reading (I learned to read using phonics in elementary school and I like to read anyways) but everyone worries about self-esteem and mental health...here is a very serious question, when a kid graduates with a GPA of 4.0 from a high school and can't read (has happened, mind you), who do you blame then, the school for not…
Where is the box I check if I am a robot?
I think there's a different kind of threat of failure that works too. When I was in first and second grade, back when men were men and women were women and dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had to stand up in class and read from our books. The very last thing your first grade self wanted was to be the one who couldn't read and stumbled and mumbled through their time in the spotlight. The abject fear of looking like an idiot caused just about everyone in the class to become an acceptable reader. I'm sure there are those of you who think this was mean and terrorized the students. We all managed to read, though.