Does taking one step back get you two steps forward? Grade retention and school performance in poor areas in rural China
Introduction
In the past, because of fiscal considerations, many provincial Departments of Education in China (and other developing countries) abolished retention or set maximum limits on the percentage of students in each cohort who could be retained during their primary school years (Guangming Daily, 2000, Liddell and Rae, 2001). For example, in Gansu province in China, primary school principals were instructed to retain no more than 3% of the students in any of the six grades that constitute elementary education (Guangming Daily, 2000). The reasoning was that since China was relatively poor, fiscally, mass education demanded that students move rapidly through the periods of compulsory education.
While the logic of such policies may be understandable from a budgetary perspective, the experience of educators internationally suggests that such a policy might adversely affect a certain segment of students. Specifically, the empirical literature outside of China has shown that in some cases students benefit from grade retention (Alexander et al., 1994, Kerzner, 1982). The argument is that grade retention is good for students who are behind in their studies (and receiving failing or near failing grades) since they are allowed to relearn the material and catch up with their peers. If this literature is correct, those who are retained should show relative improvement in the years after they were retained.
In recent years, perhaps because China's fiscal situation has improved dramatically (Wang and Zhou, 2005), the Ministry of Education eliminated the restrictions on the maximum number of students that could be retained (Ministry of Education, 2006). In some provinces local school administrators have been granted more authority in deciding how many students would be retained each year. In addition, in some areas the funding formulas were relaxed to allow schools who had relatively high rates of retention to continue to receive a “per student” subsidy (or allocation) for all students, even for those students that were repeating grades (CCTV, 2006). The idea was that this might improve the quality of education, a result that would be consistent with the findings cited above. However, it has been reported that in some localities school officials may have taken advantage of the new compensation rules and artificially inflated the retention rates purely for the fiscal gain for the school (CCTV, 2006).
As retention rates rose in some areas, new concerns, also grounded in the debate within the international education literature, surfaced. In contrast to the empirical literature that finds retention improves school performance of students (as discussed above), other research criticizes the casual use of grade retention (Grissom and Shepard, 1989, Holmes, 1989, Fine, 1991). While students who repeat a grade do get a chance to catch up, they also may experience negative psychological effects. Some educators believe that grade retention destroys the self-respect and confidence of students and can actually decrease educational performance (Royce et al., 1983). There also is a cost to the family, which has to pay for the associated costs of another year of education, and retention extends the time that their child is in school, delaying his/her entrance into the labor force (Yang, 1991). If grade retention is associated with poorer education performance, then local policies that encourage high rates of grade retention could systematically be hurting students.
Somewhat surprisingly, little work has been done to understand whether or not grade retention in the context of China helps or hurts the educational performance of children. There are discussions of grade retention in China's social science literature (Huang, 1998, Yu, 1999, Wen, 2002, Li, 2004). But, these papers are at best based on descriptive statistics. Most of the work is based on case studies and uses anecdotes as evidence. Given the fundamental importance in trying to develop better policies for improving education, there is a need to more rigorously understand empirically how grade retention affects school performance.
The overall goal of this paper is to examine the effect of grade retention on the educational performance of elementary school students in poor areas in rural China. It is possible that a better understanding of the impact of grade retention will provide policy makers with the information they need to make (or not make) changes to the administration of the educational system in China's rural areas. The results can also contribute to the general understanding of the relationship between grade retention and school performance. To meet this goal, we pursue three specific objectives. First, we compare the change of scores over time of students that were retained with students that were not retained. Second, we examine the determinants of grade retention in rural China in order to find what types of students are most likely to repeat a grade during their elementary school years. Third, we examine with multivariate analysis whether or not grade retention improves or hurts the school performance of rural students by comparing their performance relative to their fellow students, both before and after they were retained.
To meet these objectives, we will rely on a set of data that we collected in 2006, a data collection effort that was designed specifically to examine changes in school performance of children before and after they were retained. With this data set, we focus our attention on two types of students: the students who were retained in grade 2, grade 3 or grade 4 and their fellow students in the same grades that were not retained. Using these different subsets of students, we compare changes in scores before and after the students repeated their grades. A descriptive analysis is supplemented by a more rigorous multivariate analysis on the effects of grade retention on the educational performance using several approaches, including a differences-in-differences approach (DID), propensity score matching (PSM) and a combination of these two approaches (DIDM).
This study is unique in several respects. First, it contributes to the limited understanding of the effects of grade retention on the school performance in China by examining how children's scores correlate with grade retention. To date the empirical literature on grade retention and school performance in China is almost nonexistent. Second, we use the most up-to-date evaluation methods, instead of the more traditional descriptive/case study/Ordinary Least Squares approaches.
There are limitations in our approach, however. For example, we focus on students from one province in China's northwest region, Shaanxi province. Since Shaanxi province is in one of the poorest parts of China, this limits our ability to say anything about China in general. In addition, since we only examine the effect of grade retention on the school performance of the students who were retained in grade 2, grade 3 or grade 4, our conclusions can not necessarily be generalized to those students who are retained in grade 1 (the most common grade during which students are retained) or in any grade that is greater than grade 5.
Section snippets
Data
The data used in this paper come from a survey executed by the authors in 2006. The survey was designed specifically to examine the changes in school achievement of children before and after they repeated at least one grade. While the survey in part relied on recall data—especially for some of the control variables—we were able to use records and rely on multiple sources of information for our two key variables—scores of school achievement and grade retention.
The sample was drawn from 36
Grade retention in poor areas in rural China
Based on our data, one of the results that stands out above all others is the high rate of grade retention in our sample schools. Out of the 1653 students in the sample schools, 35% of the students in rural primary school repeated at least one grade before they entered grade 6 (Table 1, row 6). If such high rates of retention are common throughout China, it is clear that in the mid-2000s the prohibition against retaining a maximum of 5% of students is no longer binding. In fact, references to
Methodology
The objective of this part of the study is to examine the effect of grade retention on educational performance (Chinese language scores). In order to evaluate the effects of grade retention, conceptually we are making grade retention the treatment. In other words, our sample students are divided into a treatment group (those that were retained by the school and had to repeat a grade) and a comparison group (those that never repeated a grade). To do this, we employ a differences-in-differences
Results of multivariate analysis
The results of our DID analysis using the restricted specifications (that is, models (1) and (2)) demonstrate that the findings of the multivariate analysis are consistent with the descriptive analysis.12
Summary and conclusions
In this paper we have tried to understand whether or not grade retention helps or hurts school performance of the students that were retained for a year of schooling during their elementary school years. The issues have gained prominence since in recent years retention rates—at least anecdotally—have begun to rise. Policy makers—who at one time restricted retention rates to not exceed a maximum level—should want to know how school performance of children is being affected when local educators
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Renfu Luo and Weiwei Zhao, who have spent uncountable days coordinating the survey and cleaning data. A special thanks to all the enumerators, school principals and students. We are also grateful for the useful comments from the anonymous referees. We acknowledge grants to support field research from The Ford Foundation (Beijing), Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-N-039) and support for follow-up research from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (
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