Remedial Education and Student Achievement: A Regression-Discontinuity Analysis

Abstract

As standards and accountability have become an increasingly prominent feature of the educational landscape, educators have relied more on remedial programs such as summer school and grade retention to help low-achieving students meet minimum academic standards. Yet the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs is mixed, and prior research suffers from selection bias. However, recent school reform efforts in Chicago provide an opportunity to examine the causal impact of these remedial education programs. In 1996, the Chicago Public Schools instituted an accountability policy that tied summer school and promotional decisions to performance on standardized tests, which resulted in a highly non-linear relationship between current achievement and the probability of attending summer school or being retained. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the net effect of these programs was to substantially increase academic achievement among third graders, but not sixth graders. In addition, contrary to conventional wisdom and prior research, we find that retention increases achievement for third grade students and has little effect on math achievement for sixth grade students.

The Future of State and Local Economic Development Policy: What Research Is Needed

“…What policies work to increase local labor supply quality? Policies with good research evidence of success include: high-quality preschool (Bartik 2011;Camilli et al 2010;Heckman 2006); mandatory summer school (Jacob and Lefgren 2004); high school career academies (Kemple and Willner 2008); improving teacher quality (Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff 2011); demandoriented job training (Hollenbeck andHuang 2006, 2008). This research evidence includes both random assignment experiments, frequently with long-term follow-up on adult outcomes, as well as nonexperimental studies that arguably have very good comparison groups.…”

Elementary Grade Retention in Texas and Reading Achievement Among Racial Groups: 1994–2002

“…Alternately, several studies indicated that making students repeat a grade seemed to boost their test scores or grades, at least temporarily (e.g., Alexander, Entwisle, & Dauber, 1994;Pierson & Connell, 1992). More recent retention studies of comparable research quality also indicate that retained students obtained higher test scores than low-performing socially promoted students ( Jacobs & Lefgren, 2004;Karweit, 1999;Lorence, Dworkin, Toenjes, & Hill, 2002;Pomplun, 1988).…”

The Historical Context of the African American Social Scientist

“…Regression discontinuity analysis has several assumptions. First, unobserved characteristics of an individual must vary continuously with the observed characteristic used to identify the cutoff (Jacobs & Lefgren, 2002). Second, the treatment and control groups must both come from a single continuous pretest distribution and the division between groups must be determined by a cutoff.…”

“…The authors identified positive effects of prekindergarten attendance on children's achievement outcomes. Jacobs and Lefgren (2002) examined the impact of summer school on students' math and reading skills by assigning students to summer school based on pretest measures of reading and math and then comparing posttest reading and math scores of the treatment and control groups. The authors found that summer school increased children's subsequent reading and mathematics scores.…”