Retention, the practice of requiring a child to repeat a particular grade, is often presented as the answer for poor academic or behavioral performance in school. To explore the effectiveness of this approach, the long-term impact of retention is discussed here. The paper focuses on students who were retained in kindergarten and these students' subsequent academic performance in the sixth grade. A review of the literature on grade retention reports the different strategies that are used by schools and surveys of the results that accompany retention. The review is followed by the statement problem: Does grade retention between kindergarten and first grade assist student learning in the student's future academic performance? For the study, 56 seventh-grade students were examined. One cohort was comprised of students who were retained in kindergarten, whereas the second cohort was promoted to the first grade after their year in kindergarten. The results show that, even with remediation, the retained students lagged a year behind their nonretained counterparts. The findings support the hypothesis that retained students had significantly lower academic achievement than their nonretained peers. (Contains 13 references.) (RJM)