High school came with more responsibility and less accountability for Josiah Ulukita. Courses were much harder, teachers were less strict about attendance, and it was easier to skip school with friends or go on his phone during class, said 16-year-old Ulukita, who attends Kaimuki High School in Honolulu.
He went from easily passing middle school to failing freshman English and social studies. After missing roughly half of his freshman year due to poor attendance, he found out he needed to repeat ninth grade. Ashamed, he began to skip more school, he said — until his counselor warned him that he may not graduate on time.
“I was acing all my classes, and then I hit freshman year,” Ulukita said. “I thought it was going to be easy.”
Throughout the country, states and school districts approach retention — often considered a last resort to catch students up academically — in very different ways. In some states, like Hawaii, schools often wait until ninth grade or later to retain, or hold back, students. Other states, like Mississippi and Florida, tend to retain students at much younger ages, between kindergarten through third grade, according to numbers from 2021-22, the most recent year for which national data was available.
As concern about student performance nationally intensifies, a growing number of states are mandating this approach: More than two dozen states now have laws requiring or allowing schools to retain third grade students who are not reading at grade level, according to an analysis from the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit that tracks state legislation in the U.S.
Despite these laws, the rate of students who were retained in school fell across the U.S. from the 2011-12 to 2021-22 school years, according to data from the federal Office for Civil Rights compiled by the journalism organization Big Local News in partnership with The Hechinger Report. Overall, very few students are held back each year: Less than 2 percent of students in the U.S. repeated a grade level in 2021-22, down from about 3 percent of students a decade prior. (The Office for Civil Rights, the only source for consistent data across all states, is now eight months behind in releasing new data.)
The research on retention is mixed — there’s little consensus on whether retention can catch students up to grade level. Historically, most studies indicated that students who had to repeat a grade often benefited very little and had long-term negative consequences. Research from the past decade complicates that picture: Younger students may see some positive effects from retention if schools are also combining it with high-intensity tutoring and support, some studies have shown.
“If the retention happens in earlier grades and is combined with help — not just a threat, but some kind of positive intervention — the results, at least in the short-run, tend to be good,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington.
There is less proof that students in middle and high school, like Ulukita, ultimately benefit from repeating a grade.
Students at the all-boys public school A&T Four Middle College find their home rooms on the first day of school in Greensboro, N.C., on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. A&T Four Middle College recently started a program to help ninth graders adjust to high school. Credit: Matt Ramey for The Assembly“The evidence suggests that it leads to higher rates of student disengagement from schooling, it leads to higher rates of high school dropouts, less likelihood of high school graduations, and it leads to lower likelihood of enrolling in college. Basically, worse outcomes,” said Umut Ozek, a researcher and senior economist at the policy think tank Rand Corp., who has studied retention.
In every year measured, schools in the South held students back more than any other region, according to the data. Boys were held back more than girls, and Black boys were retained at nearly three times the rate of white boys — a gap that did not narrow over the decade even as retention fell.
In Hawaii, roughly 1 in 10 freshmen in public high schools had to repeat ninth grade in the 2021-22 school year. That was more than double the national rate for this group of students.
In the state, freshmen must earn five credits — the equivalent of five year-long classes — to move on to 10th grade. Students and teachers attribute the spike in ninth grade retention to those strict credit requirements, along with more difficult coursework and increased peer pressure to skip class and dodge assignments.
Schools work to avoid holding students back by offering summer school, counseling, personalized learning plans and other resources, Hawaii Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Heidi Armstrong said in a statement. Students may be held back when they’re struggling to make academic progress and earn enough credits to advance to the next grade, she said.
“The Department’s goal is to ensure students are prepared for continued academic success and remain on track toward earning a high school diploma,” Armstrong said, adding that schools decide to hold students back on a case-by-case basis.
Mississippi has taken a markedly different approach. In 2013, as part of an overhaul of literacy instruction, the state introduced a policy to retain third graders if they couldn’t pass the reading portion of the state’s English Language Arts assessment.
Rachel Canter, an education policy expert who helped craft the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, said Mississippi lawmakers looked to Florida in particular, where former Gov. Jeb Bush made ending “social promotion” — the practice of passing students because of their age — one of his signature policies.
“The Legislature was desperate,” Canter said. “The argument that won was, ‘We have to do something, and we know how harmful it is when kids pass with no skills.’”
The state’s third grade retention policy has had a trickle-down effect: Retentions in Mississippi are concentrated in kindergarten through second grade, too.
Researchers such as Canter say that’s because the literacy legislation established more monitoring and higher standards in those grades as well.
A&T Four Middle College students find their home rooms on the first day of school in Greensboro, NC on Thursday August 6, 2026. Credit: Matt Ramey for The AssemblyThat holds true at Western Line School District, a small district with schools on the banks of the Mississippi River. Western Line held back 68 students in kindergarten through third grade during the 2021-22 school year, compared to 56 students in all other grades combined, according to the Big Local News/Hechinger analysis.
Not all of those retentions are tied to reading, Superintendent Lawrence Hudson said, but the policy raised the bar for students in early grades.
“We want to make sure kids are successful for the rest of their life,” he said. “We know if children have deficits at younger grades, they’ll get to third grade with those deficits.” He added: “The longer you wait, the harder it is to clear those deficiencies.”
But Canter said students don’t automatically improve when they’re retained. To help students, schools have to get them the academic support they need in that year they repeat. The decision to retain a student is difficult, she said, but combined with intervention, it can pay dividends.
“Any time a child is retained, it is a signal that we have not done what we needed to do as adults,” Canter said. But the retention policy paired with additional support has “done great things for kids,” she said.
Yet some educators worry that, even in relatively well-funded school districts, resources to provide that support are falling away. Shana Richards has been a school counselor for 19 years in North Carolina, which holds back more students in ninth grade than in any other grade.
“You used to have teachers that would stay after school, provide tutoring,” said Richards, who now works at A&T Four Middle College, an all-boys public high school on the campus of North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro. “But now those people are having to leave to go to another job when the school day ends.”
The stipends for educators to provide after-school programming dried up years ago, she said, and the buses that used to carry students home from their after-school activities no longer run, either.
Richards helped design a program for her school’s incoming ninth graders that she hoped would help reduce the need for supports that are now harder to come by. She applied for a grant from the NEA Foundation to help fund the program, an expanded version of the summer orientation the school was already doing.
The program, which just completed its second year, is called “Welcome to the Brotherhood” and primarily serves the population with the highest retention rates: Black boys. Students learn study skills and hear about academic expectations from their English and math teachers. They also have time to make friends and tour the college campus that surrounds their school.
Richards meets with every student before the program begins to get a sense of their anxieties and where they might need extra support, and she meets with them again in the first month of the school year to get a sense of any emerging problems.
“We know if we can get them to and through ninth grade,” Richards said, “then they have a higher chance of actually staying until graduation.”
In Washington state, more students were held back just before graduation, in 12th grade, than at any other grade, according to the data from 2011-12 to 2021-22. That’s not because of any state policy though; decisions are made at a district level.
A&T Four Middle College guidance counselor Shana Richards greets incoming ninth graders on the first day of school in Greensboro, N.C. Richards says that in recent years in the state, the sorts of services that help keep students on track to graduation have been disappearing because of funding and other challenges. Credit: Matt Ramey for The AssemblyStill, Liz Trautman, the executive director of the Washington affiliate of Stand for Children, an advocacy organization that works to boost high school graduation rates, said she was not surprised by the trend.
“I would argue and suggest that when we see those high rates of retention in senior year, we’re actually seeing a cumulative effect of missed opportunities to intervene and to support students that started much, much earlier,” Trautman said.
Washington officials say retained students include those who were behind in credits for a variety of reasons, including from absences related to medical issues or involvement in the juvenile justice system. Many are also enrolled in transition programs for students who receive special education services and are counted as 12th graders until they’re 22 years old or exit the program, officials said.
Daniel Lee, who has spent 14 years as a counselor at Garfield High School in Seattle, said a high student-to-counselor ratio means counselors aren’t able to work with students and parents as closely as they would like to ensure students have everything they need to meet requirements before 12th grade.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a 250:1 ratio. Washington’s was 364:1 in the 2024-25 school year.
“In order for us to be effective in all facets of our job, not just interventions, but every aspect of our job — whether it’s college and career-readiness or social-emotional health — all of that hinges on the 250:1 ratio,” he said.
But, he said, counselors check in every quarter with students who are struggling to find out what’s hindering them. That could include finding ways to help them attend regularly or setting up mental health support if that’s the barrier, he said.
Tutoring and summer classes are available for those who aren’t grasping the material or need to recover credits, he said, though access to them is uneven.
“They do have an incentive to finish,” Lee said. “It’s pretty rare to say, ‘I am not doing it.’”
Ulukita, the high schooler in Hawaii who repeated ninth grade, is on track to graduate with the rest of his peers in 2028. Now a junior, he was able to earn the credits he needed to complete both his freshman and sophomore years through additional courses, after-school work and a better attendance record.
Said Ulukita: “You’ve got to lock in more, do all your classes, make sure you get all your credits — and graduate on time.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about being held back was produced by Big Local News and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with The Assembly in North Carolina, Honolulu Civil Beat, Mississippi Today and The Seattle Times.
The data analysis was conducted by Eric Sagara, senior data journalist with Big Local News. Reporting was contributed by Megan Tagami, Ariel Gilreath, Devna Bose, Carli Brosseau and Denisa R. Superville. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Learn more about Big Local News and how it supports local journalists.
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