Executive Summary: "Have We Put an End to Social Promotion? Changes in Grade Retention Rates among Children Aged 6 to 17 from 1972 to 2003" by Carl B. Frederick and Robert M. Hauser

A great deal of concern has been expressed about rising levels of economic and social inequality in the United States since the middle 1970s, and about the potential intergenerational effects of such inequality. In this context, Frederick and Hauser examine trends over time in age-grade retardation in schooling at ages 6 to 17 and in the effects of its demographic and socioeconomic correlates. They estimate a logistic regression model of age-grade retardation with interaction constraints in almost 900,000 observations of school-age children and their families in the annual October school enrollment supplements of the Current Population Survey. This model identifies systematic variation in the effects of social background across age and time from 1972 to 2003.

While the effects of social and economic background variables on progress through school become increasingly powerful as children grow older, that typical pattern has been attenuated across the past three decades by a steady, secular decline in the influence of those variables across all ages. For example, the odds of being behind the modal grade for age are three times greater at age 9 than at age 6 and eight times greater at age 17 than at age 6. However, there has been an opposite trend across time in the effects of social origins on age-grade retardation, which is one of the more important indicators of progress through schooling. Overall, the effects of social background on age-grade retardation declined steadily from 1970 through 2000. They declined by 60 percent from 1972-1976 through 1997-2000. However, there was essentially no trend in these effects from 1997-2000 through 2001-2003. A trend is not a law, and there is reason to be concerned about the recent deceleration of the secular decline in effects of social background.