The participation trophy has been systematized into K-12 schools. The number of students with perfect GPAs has reached all-time highs, even as national test scores have reached all-time lows. Yet a system in which students and teachers have few incentives to do the work is a system in which little learning is likely to occur.

Thankfully, some of the saner parts of society seem to be recognizing this.

A new report from RAND economists Umut Özek and Louis Mariano for the Fordham Institute looked at one policy that runs entirely counter to this participation trophy phenomenon: grade retention. Conventional wisdom and practice suggest that, regardless of achievement, we should shuffle kids along the K-12 conveyor belt. According to the standard narrative, holding students back leads to their stigmatization and separation from friend groups with little or no academic benefit.

After reviewing existing research, however, Özek and Mariano conclude that grade retention is actually beneficial for students, provided it happens sooner rather than later. They write that recent studies from several different states "provide evidence that grade retention in elementary school" can increase test scores and "may also increase the likelihood that students take advanced courses in middle and high school."

An important aspect of these retention policies is subsequent intervention and support. Simply holding a kid back and saying, "Good luck next year," isn’t enough. For example, Florida’s successful retention policy also requires academic improvement plans, assignments to high-performing teachers, 90 minutes of daily reading instruction, and the offer of a summer reading boot camp of sorts. Interestingly, retention seems to work not just as remediation for individual students but also as an incentive for others.

In Mississippi, for example, many analysts credit a third-grade retention test for the state’s recent gains in literacy across the board. Other states adopted policies similar to Mississippi’s regarding the Science of Reading but saw less success because they lacked that essential pressure point. There’s a spillover effect as such a policy incentivizes improvement across the board — pressuring students, teachers, parents, and administrators in the face of a significant consequence. It also incentivizes early detection systems so students at risk receive support before they hit the retention wall.

But Özek and Mariano also note that at the middle school level, research has found little academic benefit but an increased risk of students dropping out. That suggests that early grade retention laws, such as Mississippi’s third-grade cutoff focused on basic mastery of early reading skills, is an ideal one.

Contrary to popular belief, the benefits of early retention are many. Basic decoding skills are foundational to education. In the early grades, students learn to read; in later grades, they read to learn. As such, if a child can’t decode by third grade, then they’ve effectively missed the academic bus that is fourth- through twelfth-grade ELA, history, and science content. What’s more, in later grades, when social groups become more important to a child’s life and academic achievement harder to measure, retention loses its benefit.

As a former teacher, I understand the hesitation to enact retention policies. I’ve sat through difficult meetings where these decisions are made. It’s hard to look a child in the eyes and tell them that they’ll be separated from friends, destined to go through life forever knowing that they’ll be that kid that was held back. But schools will fail children if they can’t make these tough calls. In the long run, it is cruelty masquerading as compassion. Given the primary mission of any school is academic instruction, the best thing a school can do for a child is provide him or her with the intellectual tools needed to succeed in life.

We used to prize tough love, especially about rearing children. Do we still?

Daniel Buck is a former teacher and a policy and editorial associate at the Fordham Institute.