To this point in our excursion grade retention has mainly positive effects. It bolsters children's academic skills and self-confidence, the first almost certainly implicated in the second. But we have yet to consider an important facet of the retention experience: how retention overlaps other administrative placements. This concern arises because retention is a form of “educational tracking” that causes children to be off-time. They are older than their classmates and have been separated from their cohort.

Curiously, the literature on retention has been almost silent on the way retention ties in with other “sorting and selecting” arrangements used by schools, even though placement of children in special education and in low-level instructional groups occurs more often for retainees. Even less is known about closed doors later, in middle school and beyond, when formal tracking begins in earnest (an exception is the study by Stevenson, Schiller, and Schneider (1994), which finds evidence of such constraints using the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS88) data; other relevant studies are from the BSS: Alexander and Entwisle 1996; Dauber, Alexander, and Entwisle 1996). We say curiously because retention is an organizational and administrative intervention, yet research and commentary on the practice rarely take an organizational perspective (e.g., Sørensen 1970; 1987). If they did, the parallels between retention and other forms of tracking would be hard to miss (e.g., Alexander, Entwisle, and Legters 1998).