Findings from the Research Overall, neither social promotion nor retention leads to high performance. If the goal is to bring low-performing students up to the higher standards now being asserted across the nation, neither retention nor social promotion is effective. In different studies, one or the other has been found to offer an advantage, but neither has been found to offer a large, lasting advantage, and neither leads to high performance. It is impossible to tell how common social promotion is. Currently, virtually no statistics are kept on social promotions, in part because few districts explicitly embrace or admit to the practice.
Some evidence supports, and little evidence disputes, the indictment of social promotion.
Critics of social promotion argue that it frustrates promoted students by placing them in grades where they cannot do the work, sends the message to all students that they can get by without working hard, forces teachers to deal with under-prepared students while trying to teach the prepared, gives parents a false sense of their children's progress, leads employers to conclude that diplomas are meaningless, and dumps poorly educated students into a society where they cannot perform. Retention Retention is common. Nationally, no statistics are kept on retention, but reasonable estimates based on census data suggest that as many as one-third of all students have been retained at least once by the time they reach high school. For boys and minorities, retention is even more common. Nationally, by high school, the retention rate for boys is about ten percentage points higher than for girls.