Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks via flickr.com
Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks via flickr.com

Education News and the Minnesota Daily report that new research from a University of Minnesota team helmed by John Robert Warren reveals a whopping 450,000 students between grades 1 and 8 are held back every year, and there is wide variation across states. Previously, it had been thought that most of these “retentions” were evenly distributed and happened in the first grade, with students not quite ready to move into the second. Presumably, these earlier retentions would be less likely to derail an educational track or firmly established friendship ties, but those that come further into grade school would hold further-reaching effects.

As Warren tells the Daily:

“I think first grade is kind of a formative year, it’s where you begin to do the building blocks of reading and math and it’s always hard to tell when a kid is ready to move on,” Warren said. “I think there is a sentiment, right or wrong, that it might do some good to hold a kid back in first grade to help them build those foundational skills.”

Warren’s team is the first to get a look at state-by-state data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data, and they have published their full report in the journal Education Researcher.