Social promotion fails students

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Social promotion fails students				March 24, 2004

What do you do when your child, with no discernible learning disability, graduates from elementary school, gets to the eighth grade in middle school and still can’t read? Or do math?

If you’re a parent who refuses to accept responsibility for your child’s disciplinary laxity, you might well decide that your only recourse is to threaten to sue the school system. Never mind that your son is enticed more by truancy than algebra or Moby Dick, or that special dispensations and arrangements have dogged him like a basset hound throughout his academic career. All you know is that your child is 14 years old and can’t read. Or figure out what “c” is in a mathematical equation.

Much as we would like to think that a case such as this would never lure any lawyer into court, or, if it did go to court, that it would be dismissed immediately, the fact is that, through the process known as social promotion, it is possible for a student to slip through the cracks and wind up in the slough of illiteracy at age 14.

Indeed, an otherwise diligent WJC school system may unwittingly be encouraging such promotions and lawsuits by listing among its criteria for promotion and retention – in addition to academic achievement – social or emotional maturity, physical development, chronological age, placement of siblings and parental attitudes.

Hence the fact that Johnny can’t read might well be overlooked in favor of shoveling him through the grades with his chronological and emotional peers and landing him in the hot waters of high school. Emotional stability, goes the reasoning, outweighs academic performance. As one teacher put it, such students are more likely to be promoted on the basis of height and weight than academic achievement.

As it stands now, the panacea for Johnny’s illiteracy is summer school. But even that begs the issue of how, despite his failings, he’s now occupying a seat in the eighth grade and still can’t read.

In all fairness, the problem of social promotion and its effects is one that has become a hot-button issue in many areas of the country. In New York City, for instance, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who virtually annexed the school system to his office, has decreed an end to social promotion and wants students - beginning in the third grade – to repeat grades if they fail to improve their test scores in summer school. In short, he wants to pinpoint problem students early in their academic careers and, rather than sending them on up the grade line, to offer them intensive tutoring sessions before and after school, establish Saturday classes and intensify the summer school program.

In an even bolder move, New York, like many other school districts, has taken a close look at the whole concept of middle schools and found them wanting.

In an interview with the New York Times, Joel Klein, the Schools Chancellor, indicated that many middle schools would be closed, to be replaced by the old K-8 grammar schools. This would allow, he said, for greater continuity and closer connections between students and teachers. In addition, there would be more personal attention given to students, since the same teachers in English or math would be following them from grade to grade.

Queens regional superintendent Kathleen Cashin agrees. In a K-8 system, she maintains, violence seems to be reduced considerably, in that younger students tend to “defuse” older ones. As a result, academics at all levels are improved.

At a time when our School Board seems to be preoccupied with buildings, such as an ever more expensive third high or yet another elementary and middle school in Stonehouse, it would perhaps be productive to take some time out to review not only its policy for promotion and retention, but the efficacy of middle schools as well.

In an ideal academic situation, students should have to earn whatever promotions they get. Perhaps, therefore, we should eliminate such considerations as age, maturity, emotional stability or the attitude of parents. We are, after all, running educational, not psychiatric, institutions. Or at least we should be.

And we should definitely ask ourselves if we really need to establish separate middle schools solely on the basis of hormones. A return to the K-8 system might well free up enough space in our present middle schools to obviate the need for yet more new buildings. Indeed, the great deviation between SOL scores at James Blair and Berkeley should indicate that middle schools per se are not necessarily the educational sacred cows we’ve been led to believe they are.

But most important is the necessity to assure our community that every Johnny or Joanie, when they reach the eighth grade, can read and write. While we rejoice in the fact that our middle school students rank high in computer literacy and their ability to Google, we are far from being able to say that they all can hold a book or newspaper in their hands and read them with a view toward comprehension and analysis. Yet now more than ever, that is exactly what they must be able to do.

Erratum: In my last column on amendments, the verse in Leviticus allowing for the purhase of slaves from surrounding nations was incorrectly given as 23:44. It should be 25:44.