To this point we have examined how repeaters fare over the years prior to high school. Critics of grade retention tell us that the experience retards children's academic development and assaults their sense of self, but this appraisal hardly accords with the experience of repeaters in the Beginning School Study (BSS), sketched over the previous several chapters. Repeaters' academic standing after retention generally is better than before, certainly during the repeated year and in many comparisons for several years beyond the repeated grade (although in diminishing measure). Nor do we see great stigma attaching to grade retention. Results differ in minor ways across grade levels, depending on the specific attitudes being assessed, but in the main repeating a grade is associated with improved, not impaired, views of self and school. Even neutral findings would be hard to reconcile with a view of grade retention as a heavy socioemotional burden, and the favorable indications in Chapter 9 make no sense at all if the critics are correct. But if going through the curriculum a second time gives repeaters an academic boost, as seems the case for test scores and marks, then favorable socioemotional consequences make perfectly good sense — indeed they would be expected.

However, there also are troubling signs, which may well have implications later for repeaters' commitment to staying in school. Academic demands escalate in the middle grades (e.g., Eccles et al. 1984; 1991), and repeaters' marks and test scores begin to trail off at that point.