Extra-Year
Programs
Extra-year programs are assignment practices that schools establish for children who are deemed vulnerable to failure in the next level of school. These practices are based upon the assumption that one or more additional years will provide the time necessary for a child to attain school readiness. Shepard (1994) notes the following extra-year approaches that are used with young children:
Moved both by school reform concerns about raising academic standards and by the desire to protect individual children from entering a syndrome of failure, many school systems across the United States adopted one or more extra-year approaches, and a significant number continue using them. Shepard (1994) argues that despite their benign intent, extra-year programs are "ill-considered policies" (p. 208) because school personnel undertake them without considering possible unintended and negative consequences. Bredekamp and Shepard (1989) also note the potential harm in these programs:
"A careful review of the research related to testing, retention, transition classes, and earlier entrance-age cutoffs indicates that these increasingly common practices designed to protect 'unready' children from inappropriately formal schooling are at best minimally helpful in the short run for some individual children, and hurt as many children as they help. In addition, these practices are harmful because they exacerbate the problem of inappropriate curriculum--that is, the downward shoving of what were next-grade expectations into the earlier grades." (p. 15)
Gnezda, Garduque, and Schultz (1991), reporting on a workshop on curriculum and assessment in early childhood education convened by the National Forum on the Future of Children and Families, conclude:
"The supposed benefit to the child of retention and tracking, which is that his or her longer term proficiency in school will be improved, appears elusive at best. According to the workshop participants, the problem lies with the schools rather than with the 'unready' children. In effect, schools are unwilling or unready to accommodate the differences in young children's knowledge and learning that occur as a function of individual development." (p. 8)
Gnezda, Garduque, and Schultz (1991) also summarize studies showing that disproportionate numbers of certain children are most likely to be held back or placed in extra-year programs: boys, children from minority and low-income families, and the youngest members of an age group; as a result, they note:
"The increase in retention and tracking will have distorting effects on future classes, schools, and the students themselves. Besides, since most of these supposedly 'slower' children catch up to their peers by third grade, this widespread practice is unnecessary." (p. 39)
