by David Safier
There’s so much to be written about the Star’s series that began with Social Promotion in Tucson area schools Sunday and continued with Grade Inflation today. I’m going to limit myself to one small aspect of the social promotion question. Maybe I’ll write more later.
When I was taking education classes in 1968, one of the two non-instructional topics my profs dwelt on was social promotion. Back then, the concern was the dropout rate. Social promotion would lower the dropout rate, the thinking went, so it should be encouraged. Now, decades later, the consequences of social promotion are seen as the problem.
This is typical in education circles — or, maybe I should say, it’s the typical educational circle. You see a problem, so you create a fix. A few decades later, the fix becomes the problem, so you “fix” it by returning to a variation of the problem you encountered decades earlier.
Around and around we go.
Right now, for the sake of this post, let’s create a scenario where we end social promotion completely. When students fail classes, especially core classes like reading and math, they’re held back until they pass. No exceptions. Zero tolerance for failure.
Now, let’s look at the educational world we’ll create, focusing on the eighth grade, just to simplify this tremendously complicated issue.
In this world of ours, eighth graders who fail classes have to repeat the eighth grade. If they fail a second time — as many will — they have to repeat it again, and so on. Pretty soon, we have 15, 16 and 17 year olds sitting in cramped middle school desks next to their 13 and 14 year old classmates. The older students are more physically mature, and many are likely to be behavior problems. Do you want eighth grade classes attended by 15, 16 and 17 year olds who might be some of the most difficult students to educate and keep in line? For me, this creates some very uncomfortable scenarios.
But maybe the schools will take care of that problem by putting these repeat eighth graders in separate classrooms, or alternative programs. Still, they won’t be promoted to the ninth grade until they have ninth grade skills, which means many of them will stay eighth graders for years. How long will these students tolerate being held back? Not long, I imagine. After one, or at the most two years, many of them will give up and drop out.
We’re in the midst of a social and educational experiment the likes of which has never been attempted in the history of the world. We want to keep all our children in school for twelve years, and at the same time, we want all of them to reach a high level of proficiency in reading, writing and math. Those conflicting aspirations put us in a bind. If some of our students aren’t proficient, do we adopt a zero tolerance policy on their performance and risk increasing the number of drop outs, or do we do everything in our power to keep them in school, hoping that some of them will kick in later and develop the skills we want them to have, or at the very least will reach a higher level of proficiency by remaining in school than by leaving?
Much of our educational conversation is driven by the dynamic conflict between keeping students in school and increasing their levels of academic proficiency, but we rarely phrase it in those terms.