Repetition undermines social inclusion at school

Abstract

Regardless of other possible effects, grade repetition forces students to disconnect from their friends in class and connect with their new classmates. This study quantifies how grade retention affects students´ social integration. To analyze short-term effects, we use a propensity score matching to compare retained students with their “statistical twins”. For long-term effects, we compare current repeaters with those who repeated in the past. The results are not optimistic. In the short term, retained students are less popular, have more enemies and fewer «good» friends in the classroom. They are also more likely to appear in hate networks. In the long term, ´former´ retained students are slightly more popular than current students, but in all other respects they remain the same. We conclude that grade retention has a strong negative impact on students´ social relationships, and that this effect hardly diminishes over time.