The best alternative to retention is appropriate, specialized help for your child's learning difficulties combined with appropriate modifications and support to enable your child to keep up in academic subjects other than reading. If your child already has an IEP, it may be appropriate to review the IEP and reconsider the goals set and the specific educational services being provided, rather than hold your child back.

Kindergarten and Entering First Grade

If retention is suggested because of your child's poor reading skills or apparent lack of reading readiness, you should immediately ask that your child be assessed if she has not already been diagnosed with a learning disability. Do not accept the teacher's opinion that your child is merely immature or needs an extra year — even if the teacher turns out to be right, the apparent need for retention is a red flag that your child should be evaluated. Follow the procedures outlined in Chapter 10 to request and obtain special education services through the school.

If your child is still in kindergarten, consider both his actual age and social fit. Although the practice of holding children back to repeat a year of kindergarten is very common in many districts, there is no research evidence proving that this well help. However, many of the studies reporting long-term deleterious effects of retention focus on the child being old for his grade. If your child is one of the younger children in his class, there may be no harm in repeating kindergarten, particularly if he seems socially immature or unready for the behavioral expectations of first-grade.

However, it is still important that your child be evaluated for learning disabilities. Keep in mind that some early intervention strategies — particularly phonemic awareness training — seem to lose effectiveness if delayed past the age of seven. Find out what services your school offers to first-grade students, and ask whether your child can receive the services with a repeated year that he might also get if promoted.

Beyond First Grade

At first-grade level and above, you should not agree to retention based on concerns about your child's academic skill level if your child will simply be repeating the same curriculum in the same basic setting. Your child does not need more of the same instruction; he needs a different approach. Tutoring and remedial teaching can be provided to a promoted child as easily as it can to a retained child, and your child is likely to be more motivated and engaged in school if being introduced to new material.

One alternative to retention is to place your child in a transitional classroom with an enriched curriculum designed to lead to double promotion, with the intent that after the transitional year she will catch up with her age cohorts. It is possible that even without such a classroom, an IEP could be written to effectively serve the same goals.

In some schools, you may be able to arrange partial acceleration or retention — that is, a combined approach where your child moves on to the next grade for some or all subjects, but leaves the classroom to work with the lower grade for areas where there are specific skill deficits, usually reading or arithmetic. This should not be used in lieu of specialized remedial help, but is something to consider if it is clear that your child will not be able to keep up even with accommodations with isolated subject areas.

Some elementary schools have mixed-age, ungraded or combined grade classrooms. Often, such schools have overlapping grades — for example, one classroom may have a grade 4/5 combination, with a 5/6 grade combination in another classroom. In such a setting, the decision to keep your child with the “lower” graded combination is not the same as retention — teachers in this environment are used to having students for more than one year and to teaching a varied curriculum. If your child has been doing well with a particular teacher in this type of environment, he may benefit from staying with that teacher another year. Conversely, if he has not been doing well, it may be time for a change, even if it seems illogical to push the child into the more difficult level.