Grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate. In this
article, we measure the effect of grade retention on Spanish students’ achievement
by using data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).We
find that grade retention has a negative impact on educational outcomes, but we
confirm the importance of endogenous selection which makes observed differences
between repeaters and nonrepeaters appear about 14% lower than they
actually are. The effect on scores of repeating is much smaller (–10% of nonrepeaters’
average) than the counterfactual reduction that nonrepeaters would
suffer had they been retained as repeaters (–24% of their average). Furthermore,
those who repeated a grade during primary education suffered more than those
who repeated a grade in secondary school, although the effect of repeating at both
times is, as expected, larger.
