In my public school years, I knew a guy who was a year older than me. We were in the same class because somewhere in the early grades, he had been held back a year.
I was aware of this, although I can no longer remember how I knew it. I didn’t know the exact reason he was held back, or the subjects for which he was held back. It never mattered to me. We were friends and that was good enough. The subject didn’t come up.
This probably sounds very old-fashioned to today’s school-age generation (we were also paddled occasionally by the principal, but that’s another column for a different time).
I didn’t grow up in Utah, but schools here and in most of the nation have, for years now, automatically passed kids to the next grade, regardless of how well they mastered subjects in the previous grade.
A move may be afoot to change that.
Gov. Cox’s plan
My ears perked last Tuesday when Gov. Spencer Cox told the Deseret News editorial board he would urge the Legislature next month to implement “retention,” as it’s known, for Utah third graders who haven’t learned to read on grade level.
Cox is intrigued by what he and others call the “Mississippi miracle.” Several years ago, that state dedicated itself to giving teachers special training in phonics and the art of teaching reading through something called the “2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act.” It also implemented a retention policy.
As the New York Post put it, “Mississippi went from 49th in fourth-grade reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (test) about a decade ago to ninth in 2024.”
Cox said Utah has already implemented much of what Mississippi does, but that much of its success came because of the retention policy, something he now would like lawmakers to require here.
“I know that’s kind of unpopular,” Cox said. “Most of us, when we were kids, there was something like that, and kids got held back, and we stopped doing that.
“It turns out that that is a really important incentive.”
I asked him which groups he expected to form a roadblock for such a policy — teachers, parents, unions or others? He smiled and said, “We’re about to find out. I think it’s a little bit all of the above.”
Stigma?
Cox acknowledged there may have been a stigma attached to being held back a grade in the old days, saying, “That was sometimes harmful.”
But, he added, “The worse stigma is when you can’t get a job or you end up in jail because you can’t read.”
The grown-up world can indeed be less tolerant and forgiving than the school world.
I had two more questions. The first was what retention would do to third-grade classrooms that are already overcrowded. Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said this hasn’t been a big problem in Mississippi because the threat of being held back has incentivized teachers, students and parents to make sure it doesn’t happen.
The second question was what would happen to kids who are learning English as a second language. Would they be held back despite their best efforts? Cox acknowledged there is still work to be done to address such issues, but that Mississippi must have dealt with the same problem.
Is it really a miracle?
Speaking of Mississippi, its “miracle” is not without detractors. A paper published at Columbia University suggested selection bias in those test scores. The NAEP assessment tests are conducted in the fourth and eighth grades. Those students who had trouble reading in the third grade were not tested because they didn’t advance a grade, making the scores higher than they otherwise would have been. Some claim that’s “gaming the system.”
The state’s eighth grade scores were lower than the national average. Utah’s fourth grade average reading score, meanwhile, is already about the same as Mississippi’s.
But, of course, it’s hard to compare two completely different states with different demographics. It’s also hard to put too much emphasis on Mississippi’s selection bias. If kids are kept from testing until they read better, well, isn’t that the point? They would be tested the next year and those results would then show them reading well or not.
It remains to be seen whether Cox’s idea will make it into law, given the likely headwinds.
As for my childhood friend, he recently retired after a successful career. The stigma of being held back, if there ever was one, didn’t seem to last long.