Social promotion
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Social promotion is the practice of promoting a student (usually a general education student, rather than a special education student) to the next grade despite their poor grades in order to keep them with social peers. It is sometimes referred to as promotion based on seat time. The alternative, to "hold back" a student with poor grades, is called grade retention.
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[edit] Extent of social promotion
In Canada and the United States, this practice is only used from kindergarten through eighth grade. Advocates of social promotion argue that this is done so as not to harm the students' self-esteem, to keep students together by age (together with their age cohort), and to allow teachers to get rid of problem students. The alternative to social promotion is a policy of grade retention, where students repeat a grade when they are judged to be a low performer. The aim of retention is to help the student learn and sharpen skills such as organization, management, study skills, literacy and academic which are very important before entering the next grade, college and the labor force.
[edit] Common arguments against and for social promotion
[edit] Arguments against social promotion
Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education. As a result, when the child gets to high school they will probably be forced to be retained or attend summer school. Studies have shown that the high school student that is being retained would be inexcusably painful for a student emotionally because high school students are more vulnerable to change; they are experiencing a lot of pressure because of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Opponents of social promotion argue that it has the following negative impacts:
- Students who are promoted cannot do the work
- Students will have many failures in the high school years which will most likely lead to dropping out
- It sends the message to all students that they can get by without working hard
- It forces teachers to deal with under-prepared students while trying to teach the prepared
- It gives parents a false sense of their children's progress
Some hold that most students at the elementary school level don't take their education seriously and therefore retention is most likely not to be effective. Since most middle school students value their education more, retention should be used if they are judged not to have adequate skills before entering high school.
[edit] Arguments for social promotion
Opponents of "no social promotion" policies do not defend social promotion so much as say that retention is even worse. They argue that retention is not a cost-effective response to poor performance when compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as additional tutoring and summer school. They point to a wide range of research findings that show no advantage to, or even harm from, retention, and the tendency for gains from retention to wash out.
Harm from retention cited by these critics include:
- Increased drop-out rates of retained students over time
- No evidence of long-term academic benefit for retained students
- Increased rates of dangerous behaviors such as drinking, drug-use, crime, and teenage pregnancy among retained students as compared with similarly performing promoted students.
- Feeling left out with kids from different age groups, being too old for kids might start: bullying,less friends, made fun of.
Critics of retention also note that retention has hard dollar costs for school systems: requiring a student to repeat a grade is essentially to add one student for a year to the school system, assuming that the student does in fact stay in the system until graduating from high school.
[edit] Statistics
In the United States, no statistics are kept on retention. For boys and minorities, retention is even more common. Nationally, by the time students reach high school, the retention rate for boys is about ten percentage points higher than for girls. In the early grades, retention rates are similar among white Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans. By high school, the rate is about 15 percentage points higher for African Americans and Hispanics than for whites.
[edit] History
In 1982, New York City schools stopped social promotions. Within a few years, the problems caused by the change in policy lead the city to start social promotion again. In 1999, the city once again eliminated social promotion; it reinstated it after the number of holdovers had mounted to 100,000 by 2004, driving up costs and leading to cutbacks in numerous programs, including those for helping underachievers.
President Bill Clinton stated in a State of the Union address on putting an end to social promotion in American schools.[citation needed] Social promotion was ended in Chicago in 1999 at mayor Richard M. Daley's urging, and in numerous other cities including Baltimore and Philadelphia in the 1990s.
[edit] Studies
In 1999, educational researcher Robert Hauser said of the New York City school district: "In its plan to end social promotion the administration appears to have [included] ... an enforcement provision -- flunking kids by the carload lot -- about which the great mass of evidence is strongly negative. And this policy will hurt poor and minority children most of all."
[edit] Alternatives
In the US simple social promotion was not held to be an adequate alternative to grade retention. Current theories among academic scholars prefer to address underperformance problems with remedial help. Students with singular needs or disabilities require special teaching approaches, equipment, or care within or outside a regular classroom. The current system (see also: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) can result in a student with an IQ of 82 being retained, while one with equal performance and an IQ of 78 is promoted.
[edit] Further reading
- "Schools Repeat Social Promotion Problems", Sheryl McCarthy, Newsday, March 28, 2002.
- "What If We Ended Social Promotion?", Education Week, April 7, 1999, pp 64-66.
- Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, 2006
[edit] External links
- Taking Responsibility for Ending Social Promotion: A Guide for Educators and State and Local Leaders, U.S. Department of Education, May 1999
- Retention and Social Promotion: Research and Implications for Policy. ERIC Digest Number 161, December 2000.
- Beyond Social Promotion and Retention—Five Strategies to Help Students Succeed, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 2001
- Position Statement on Student Grade Retention and Social Promotion, National Association of School Psychologists, April 12, 2003
- Wrightslaw articles on retention and social promotion
[edit] References
Categories: Articles lacking sources from February 2007 | All articles lacking sources | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Education issues | Education in the United States | Education in Canada | Education reform | Standards-based education
