Op-Ed Times Social Promotion

I begged and pleaded for two of my students to be held back last year due to the fact that they needed another year of reading instruction and remediation. The principal said no. Retention hurts children’s self-esteem, she said. So I was not even allowed to ask the parents in for a conference to discuss it. The regular teachers caved to the principal. So what happened? The kids are even further behind and can’t do any of the regular classwork. Ironically, people are talking about retaining them for next year. But they will be repeating grades that they are still not prepared for, so what’s the use? They needed to repeat first grade so they could have been taught to read.

I’m glad to see an article with some common sense once in awhile.

Janis

They do retain students in our district and we do have the no more than twice in grades K thru 8 rule. I think with NCLB there will be even more of this going on. For example, when the kids come to high school some of them are reading on very low levels (elementary) and they need to be up to a certain level in order for the school to not be tagged as need of improvement. But, it is impossible to take a student from a second or third grade reading level and take them to grade 10 in one year. The backlash in our district is that the high school is fighting harder to end social promotion in order to meet NCLB standards.

We have a province-wide law that a child can only be repeated once in Grades 1 to 6. It is a disaster. If a child doesn’t learn to read and could really benefit from another chance at Grade 1, everyone is afraid to fail him because what if they need that one chance later? So the failure card is saved until Grade 5 or 6, when it is too late.

Two weeks ago I was asked to evaluate two brothers; the twelve-year-old in Grade 6 reads at a very inaccurate 2.5 level, and the seven-year-old in Grade 2 can’t read even the word “and” (thanks, “whole-language”). Both of the boys had reasonably normal spoken language for their age. Both of these kids should have had a lot more help, a lot earlier. The older is having behaviour problems, surprise, surprise.

Two possible repetitons between 1 and 8 would allow the first to be used when it could do some good.

On the other hand, I saw some real abuses of repetition policy when I worked in rural areas of the west. In one school they had striped classes — little kids near the window, slightly taller kids in the middle two rows, and kids a head taller and with much darker skins in the two rows near the wall. The schools had an official social promotion policy and an unofficial repetiton policy. In order to repeat a kid, the school had to get the parents to agree. English-speaking European parents argued against retention, got special education as available, and did extra work with their kids; Indian parents felt pressured by the school system and accepted it. Also the provincial governments passed out official policies on how to teach Indian kids that were the most incredible whitewashed racism I have ever seen; they in so many words stated that pushing Indians ahead academically was the worst thing to do, and recommended them repeating kindergarten. The school repeated over 90% of Indian children in both kindergarten and in Grade 2, meaning that they got to Grade 6 at age 13 as opposed to their European classmates’ average of 11, a huge difference for adolescents. Oddly enough, over 90% of Indian students dropped out in junior high, and I’m not sure of any of them ever graduated. Another area I was in, no Indian kid ever had finished Grade 10, not surprising with three sixteen-year-olds in Grade 8.

I am all for retention for academic reasons, but it has to be applied with great care and some double checks.

We retained our fourth grade son this year. We should have done it earlier but in our naivete we went along with the school who told us LD kids shouldn’t be retained. I now understand that was their way of saying he won’t catch up anyway so what difference does it make.

He was doing low average work in the public school and we switched him to a parochial school that was more advanced. He has complained about it off and on but only when some kids at school asked him why he was with a different soccer group (this is by age not grade) was he seriously upset. I think switching schools made it easier and the fact that his new school was much more demanding (incredible difference in homework load) saved face too.

We did it because our gut said it was right but there certainly wasn’t much research out there supporting this kind of decision.

It was the right decision. He is able to do grade level work and has made the honor roll for the first time in his life. We just got his report card and it was all A’s and B’s again. His math, which was seriously falling apart at the end of last year, is much better. That played into our decision as much as the reading. He is being taught grammar—which he never got in resource room. And just as importantly, he is in the center of things socially instead of on the fringe like he had been with kids his own age.

I also have seen a neighbor child who is not LD but just was immature really benefit from retention. The parents now say their only regret was not doing it earlier (they retained him in 3rd after sending him to summer school in first and second grade and getting him tutoring).

Beth

The research shows that except for kids with sporadic school attendance, chronic illness with hospitalization, etc. retention may have a short term “bounce” but 3 yrs later these students are still at the bottom of the class. Mandatory summer school, after school help and special ed. will do more. To close the gap retained kids will have to work harder and faster than they worked in the past…usually while being exposed to the same type of teaching methods that were not successful in the past.

SAR, those are warped statistics. If they took the same kids, passed them on up unprepared, they’d still be at the bottom of the class in three years. Don’t let them fool you. I think it’s all about MONEY.

Janis

For some more info. try the National Assoc. of School Psychologist’s web site and http://www.ericfacility.net/ericdigests/ed48924.html

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Retention is one of those multi faceted issues

When we moved to IN 12 years ago I was struck by how old the kids were. They had a june 1st cut off date and parents still routinely started boys a year later. Basketball was big and it wasnt too hard to figure out the ‘real’ reasoning

So now you end up with a class where a full third of the kids are a year older than they should be and perfectly fine academically. It sort of advances teh expectations and those who struggle almost appear farther behind, KWIM???

I was so turned off by the retention for sports attitude that I refused to retain my youngest. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

Despite the trends and whats best for the crowd, there will still be individual instances where retention is a good choice. My guy, in addition to learning problems, is small and immature. I do think it would have been a good choice but I will not do it at this late date

Flip side? There were 8th graders in IN with drivers licenses. Older kids in your child’s grade make for farmore opportunties to access drugs and alcohol. Do you REALLY want a 16+ boy in your 8th gr daughters class?

I agree with SAR that it is too easy to overestimate the short term. Of course a kid repeating kindergarten will do better the second time around-how can they not? Subjective reports from parent and teachers like these are what keeps retention in a positive light

But there is no evidence IME of long term benefits and pay offs. There IS a correlation with increased violent behavior(great, just what we need)

But, even though I am overall against retention, it is like everything-gray!!!

There are still kids who will benefit from retention(Ijust think they are rare and the circumstances need to be looked at individually;no hard and fast “you scored below 53-you’re retained” rules)

http://www.nasponline.org/information/pospaper_graderetent.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/education/07school.html?th

Chicago’s aggressive nine-year effort to end social promotion, which served as a model for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s new third-grade retention policy, has been enormously expensive while yielding few benefits, according to two studies released yesterday by researchers who have monitored the effort.

The reports found that the strict promotion rules, adopted in the 1995-96 school year, had not helped third graders, had sharply increased special education placements for third and sixth graders and had led to a higher dropout rate for students who were forced to repeat eighth grade.

The studies offer the most comprehensive examination to date of a large urban school system that adopted a stringent policy of holding back its lowest-achieving students based on test scores. Many of its results, however, were foreshadowed in earlier studies, including one that examined a similar program in New York two decades ago that was quickly abandoned.

In New York City, Mr. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein have said they would hold back third graders who have not mastered basic skills. But is at that grade that the Chicago researchers found the least benefits of holding children back.

“In third grade, across the studies, I see no benefits,” said Melissa Roderick, the chief investigator for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Chicago that prepared the studies.

She added: “The question for New York is: do you have the kind of problem that this is going to solve? At least in the third grade, it didn’t solve any of our problems.”

But Chancellor Klein seemed to push aside the findings, suggesting that New York City’s plan would be more effective. He focused on an aspect of the report that urged giving very young children extra help, which New York City hopes to do, despite the fact that the city has not yet allocated money for such programs.

“The Chicago study strongly supports our view that effective early grade interventions are key to ending social promotion and preparing students for the hard work they will encounter in later grades,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Klein insisted that thousands of third graders in danger of being held back were already getting extra support, and he noted that Mr. Bloomberg had proposed using additional state education aid to improve instruction in the early grades, beginning with a prekindergarten program for 3-year-olds.

Mr. Bloomberg’s plan won approval only after he arranged the firing of three members of the Panel for Educational Policy. Critics have said that the plan does not do enough in the earliest grades and that the city has not earmarked enough money for extra tutoring or summer school. And yesterday some said the mayor was failing to heed a loud warning in the Chicago studies.

“The proposal put forward by the mayor and the chancellor isn’t going to work, and it hasn’t worked in Chicago,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, the chairwoman of the City Council Education Committee. “It’s great to have social scientific data to prove this, but skilled educators know this stuff intuitively. The only people who don’t seem to know this is the Department of Education.”

Last month, in anticipation of the reports released yesterday, the Chicago Board of Education voted to ease its promotion rules. The board eliminated the use of math scores as a factor in promotion decisions, focusing the policy solely on reading scores, and it changed the rules so that no student could be forced to repeat the same grade twice or be forced to repeat more than two grades between kindergarten and eighth grade.

New York’s plan requires students to clear cutoffs on reading and math tests to be promoted, and Mr. Bloomberg has vowed to maintain the math requirement, despite Chicago’s decision.

Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the Chicago public schools, did not dispute the findings in the studies, but focused, instead, on the school system’s overall improvement. While the report drew no such conclusion, he credited the tough promotion rules for improvements in the system as a whole, including better overall test scores, higher graduation and attendance rates and a lower overall dropout rate.

“Common sense tells you that ending social promotion has contributed to higher test scores and lower dropout rates over the last eight years,” he said at a news conference, adding, “I am absolutely convinced in my heart, it’s the right thing to do.”

Ms. Roderick and other researchers acknowledged that the Chicago school system had experienced an overall rise in standardized test scores, but said that the improvement was restricted to the upper grades and that third-grade scores had remained flat. The increases were influenced not just by the promotion rules, they said, but by many factors, including an improving economy, changing demographics, increased spending, stronger test preparation and other educational innovations.

Previous studies by the Consortium on Chicago School Research found some benefits to the summer school program used to enforce the promotion rules.

They also found that sixth and eighth graders were mature enough to understand the consequences of being left back, prompting some of them to work harder.

The Chicago system is the nation’s third-largest, with 600 schools and 434,000 students. Overall, more than 100,000 students have been held back since the policy was adopted. The total cost of the effort is difficult to calculate, and officials declined to give an estimate yesterday. But based on average spending per student, the extra year of schooling alone has cost the city more than $560 million.

The studies released yesterday focused specifically on the impact of the promotion rules on students forced to repeat a grade.

One study, by Ms. Roderick and Jenny Nagaoka, found that compared with similarly poorly performing students who were promoted to the fourth grade, third graders who were left back performed slightly better the next year, but then slightly worse two years later. Sixth graders who were left back had demonstrably lower achievement than their promoted classmates in the two years after being retained.

The second study released yesterday, by Elaine Allensworth, also part of the consortium, found that students forced to repeat eighth grade were more likely to drop out.

Ms. Roderick said that perhaps her most important finding was that students who were held back could be identified as struggling as early as first grade.

Based on this, Ms. Roderick urged school officials to help struggling students as early as possible. “Even third grade is too late,” she said.

Mr. Duncan said that in adjusting the policy, Chicago officials had already addressed much of the criticism in yesterday’s reports. For example, he said, special education referrals had already been reduced.

But Donald R. Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, an advocacy group that monitors the Chicago schools, questioned the morality of the promotion policy.

“The policy has failed,” he said. “Retained students have shown no academic benefits and have been harmed.”

He also said that any motivational gains came at too steep a price. “That’s not ethical,” he said. “You can’t sacrifice the most vulnerable children in the system to scare other children into doing better.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the New York City teachers’ union, said Mr. Bloomberg should learn from Chicago’s experience. “This should be a red flag,” she said. “Tough retention policies don’t help kids.”

From today’s NY Times:

Houston Schools Ease Rules on High School Promotion
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Published: April 9, 2004

fter years of toughening standards for the promotion of ninth graders, the Houston Independent School District reversed course on Thursday, saying high school students who failed core subjects could now go on to the next grade, provided they had sufficient credits from other courses.

In a unanimous vote, the board gave preliminary approval to a proposal from the Houston schools superintendent, Kaye Stripling, to restore the district’s former policy of promoting students based on the number of credits they had accumulated. Ms. Stripling said that holding children back in the ninth grade, which the district had once defended as a rejection of “social promotion,” served only to raise dropout rates.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep a child back until he is 17 or 18 years old because he passed all his subjects except one,” Dr. Stripling said in a news release. “A student sitting in the ninth grade at age 17 is a kid who is going to say, `Forget this; I’m dropping out.’ And Houston can’t afford to lose its children that way.”

School districts around the country are grappling with the issue of social promotion. In New York City, for example, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants to hold back third graders who have not mastered basic skills. But in Chicago, the school board recently eased promotion rules as studies showed that its attempts to curtail social promotion had led to greater dropout rates and few educational benefits.

The about-face in Houston comes after a turbulent year for its schools. Last spring, the schools, which had been held up as a showcase for George W. Bush’s educational accomplishments when he was the governor of Texas, were found to have vastly underreported dropout rates. While the schools had reported a 1.5 percent dropout rate to state officials, a state audit of 16 Houston schools found that nearly 54 percent of the 5,500 students who had left those schools should have been counted as dropouts, but had not been.

More recently, a Houston television station, KHOU, reported on the growing tendency since the mid-1990’s for high schools to hold children back in the 9th grade, in some cases by not giving weaker students the courses they would need for promotion to 10th grade. In some instances, students were held back several times in the 9th grade, and then were suddenly promoted to the 12th grade.

To graduate, they still had to take the state test given to 10th graders, but their scores did not affect schools’ ratings, on which bonuses for school employees were based.

While the Houston schools managed to avoid being downgraded after the dropout revelations, the state did require a monitor to oversee their recordkeeping. Additionally, Texas abandoned the 10th-grade assessment in favor of an 11th-grade exam required for graduation, reducing the pressure to show high scores in the 10th grade.

After the decision on Thursday, some education advocates welcomed the abandonment of a practice they had long criticized. But the shift also created bitterness, particularly among students who felt their lives had been short-circuited by the previous practice. School officials had maintained that holding children back in the ninth grade was meant to improve learning.

“Our first responsibility is to educate children,” Terry Abbott, the spokesman for the Houston schools, wrote to KHOU last November. “Social promotion is harmful to students and is being abolished in Texas” and elsewhere, he wrote.

Under the policy approved Thursday, students in the Houston Independent School District must still pass the core subjects — including algebra, geometry, biology and English — but may do so at any time before graduation.

George Scott, an online education columnist for EdNews.org, who analyzes test scores in Houston, said that he agreed with the change, but did not trust the motives of school officials. “On the one hand, H.I.S.D. gamed the system to keep kids from taking the test,” Mr. Scott said. “On the other hand, they have a dropout problem, and this is another way to game the system.”

Luis Vega, a 20-year-old who was held back for three years as a ninth grader at Austin High School, said he was shocked by the district’s turnaround. At Austin, he said, he did poorly in a basic math course, but had been given teachers who were foreign-born, and whom he had trouble understanding.

“They should have put me with teachers who had more experience with students who were slow learners,” he said. “Instead they threw us away like trash. You just learn by yourself in any way you can.”

Mr. Vega now attends a charter school run by the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans, and is on track to graduate from high school this June, said Gilbert Moreno, the organization’s director.