Following the 2023-24 school year, 455 students were retained in third grade. During the 2024 legislative session, the Indiana General Assembly passed Senate Enrolled Act (SEA) 1, meant to spur improvements in student literacy outcomes. For all its carrots, SEA 1 also brought a noteworthy stick. Namely, retention for all third grade students who didn’t pass IREAD by the end of third grade.

Earlier this year, based on the most recent IREAD data at the time, I predicted something in the ballpark of 8,000 Hoosier students might be retained because of the new law. But we just wouldn’t know until we finished the school year and the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) released its formal data. 

How Many Students Did Indiana Retain in Third Grade?

Now, following a recent IDOE presentation to the Indiana State Board of Education, we finally know the impact of SEA 1. Here’s how it all shook out:

• Over 84,000 students took IREAD during the 2024-25 school year
• Pass rates on IREAD rose by five percentage points over the previous year to 87.3%
• That left 10,663 students who didn’t pass IREAD last year
• 6,950 of those students received a good cause exemption, meaning they were allowed to carry on to fourth grade
• That left 3,040 students who were retained across Indiana schools while another 673 students transferred out of state or transitioned to home schooling

Just over three thousand is a far cry from the more apocalyptic scenario of 8,000. It also still represents a drastic increase over the 455 we saw the previous year. In a recent tweet, WFYI journalist Eric Weddle noted, “It’s the most students retained since Indiana began tracking elementary reading proficiency.”

What’s Behind the Jump in Good Cause Exemptions?

Time for a little comparison. Because something else stuck out to me comparing this data to the previous year. For the 2023-24 school year, 14,307 students failed to pass IREAD. Of those students, around 4,726 received a good cause exemption (more on what those are here). This year, 10,663 students failed to pass IREAD. More students passed. Less students failed. But the number of good cause exemptions jumped to 6,950. 

The exemption rate in 2023-24 was just under 33%. In 2024-25, it was a touch over 65%. That’s a meaningful swing. Why might that be the case? 

Relying on Chalkbeat’s helpful legwork, the students who received these exemptions break out as follows: “of the students who went to fourth grade with an exemption, nearly 75% were students in special education and nearly 24% were English learners. The remaining roughly 1% were either proficient in math or previously held back.” So it’s not as if students who didn’t qualify were somehow getting exemptions.

What’s more, zoom out using this handy data dashboard the IDOE released, and you see similar and even larger proportions in past years. Consider 2016 when 8,024 students failed and 5,836 received an exemption (almost 73%). The raw number of exemptions isn’t unprecedented either. Take 2022, when 13,684 students failed IREAD and 7,455 received an exemption. So it really does swing based on which students (and how many) pass IREAD and the overall makeup of the student population in a given year.

Still, like Eric Weddle pointed out, the thing that is incontrovertibly unprecedented is that far more students were retained this year than any other for as long as the IDOE has tracked it. But look at IDOE’s dashboard again and you might be surprised just like I was to discover we did in the somewhat distant past retain students at much higher rates than we did in the immediate years preceding SEA 1. 

Look at 2016 again and you’ll find every single student (all 2,188 of them) who didn’t receive an exemption, got retained. Only starting in 2017 did Indiana begin promoting the vast majority of students who didn’t receive an exemption.

What’s the Future for Retained Students?

The research on what happens when you retain students is notoriously ambiguous. Consider this very first takeaway from a deep-dive the former Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum did back in 2023: “The overall costs and benefits of retention are not well understood.” 

No reason to reinvent the wheel Barnum carefully constructed, so a couple other things to pull out from his article. “Retention appears to boost test scores – at least in the short term.” But, “the long-run effects of early grade retention are not clear.” His full article is worth a read. Ultimately, our state leaders weighed the possible upsides and downsides and decided a stiffer retention law was worth it. 

Maybe. Maybe not. We might not know for years. In the meantime, we have 3,040 students repeating third grade and a commitment from the state, according to a recent article in Chalkbeat Indiana, to “continue to make sure educators have what they need to improve literacy rates overall.”