Social promotion or retention? two wrongs still don't make a right

Leadership, March, 2001 by Dennis R. Parker

Enlightened retention policies can lead to working smarter, providing more powerful classroom instruction and better intervention measures, and disallowing failure as an option.

"Dear God: I got left back. Thanks a lot. -- Raymond" (Children's Letters to God, 1966)

Unlike any other profession, education rides an ideological pendulum with uncanny regularity. From bridge builders to pediatricians to automobile designers, better practices and products regularly replace old ones. Yet education policymakers sometimes revert to the past for their future. They think nothing of readopting materials, practices or policies from the past and calling them "innovations." Indeed, it is now not unusual to find "new" books in classrooms that were originally used in the '70s, language policies for immigrant students that would make Henry Ford rejoice, a revival of norm-referenced tests and bell curves born of social Darwinism and eugenics from the turn of the century, not to mention a resurrection of retention as a cure for social promotion and other academic maladies.

It is not that we don't make research-based advances -- most recently in the area of helping high-poverty schools become high-performing. It is just that our affinity for the occasional lapse backwards appears so alive and so well.

Oddly, between the mid-'80s and the mid-'90s, research appeared to all but put to rest retention as a viable alternative to underperformance. In 1993, the California Department of Education even provided a comprehensive research summary on the topic and offered alternatives with its publication, "Beyond Retention: A Study of Retention Rates, Practices, and Successful Alternatives in California." Notwithstanding, there is now a recent spate of legislation that has revived retention as a requirement for students not meeting standards.

Who is most likely to be retained? Students for whom schools are traditionally least successful: minorities, English Language Learners, students with special needs and students living in poverty. And the percentage of such students is steadily creeping up by an average of 1 percent to 3 percent per year.

Richard Rodriguez announced recently on The PBS News Hour that all ethnic groups in California now number less than 50 percent, including whites. That makes us like Hawaii, the nation's first majority-minority state. It also means that traditional approaches to education will result in decreasing educational outcomes if we continue to conduct business as usual, making differences that do not make a difference.

In fact, "poor and minority students only fail because of the way we run schools now," observes Benjamin Bloom. Do the same things, get the same results. Do dramatically different things, get dramatically different results.

Whether you agree with this characterization or not, the task before us is to ensure that all students meet gradelevel standards in preparation for a role in the Information Age, a much more cognitively-demanding role than baby boomers faced as students.

But how do we end social promotion, heed the negative research on retentions and still comply with new laws in ways that will pay off for students? There are answers to this question if we can learn from our mistakes. It means working smarter and more strategically, providing more powerful classroom instruction as well as better prevention and intervention measures, and implementing a more enlightened version of retention, should it come to that.

The case against social promotion

The hue and cry has gone up. End social promotion! From former President Clinton's most recent State of the Union addresses on down -- through legislatures, state education agencies and local administrations -- the current consensus opposes passing kids on in payment for seat time and good behavior.

And it makes sense. We are trying to learn to live and work by a new performance-based ethic. We have state content standards, state tests and benchmarks, data-driven decision-making and rewards and sanctions for demonstrated performance. Delaine Eastin has challenged the bell curve, calling for 90 percent of the state's students to meet grade-level standards by 2006. Indeed, the High School Exit Exam will soon replace "mercy D's." Clearly, social promotion is inconsistent with this scene.

Besides, it just goes against the grain of our pragmatic, up-by-the-boot-straps culture where the Puritan work ethic still reigns and people still frown on getting something for nothing. How it has lasted this long is anyone's guess. In fact, the advent of standards-based education and the subsequent demise of social promotion might be just what the doctor ordered to support our elusive pursuit of equitable educational opportunities as well as outcomes.

At any rate, with the passage of AB 1626, AB 1639, SB 1370 and SB 1683, the Legislature intended to end social promotion for good, replacing it with a variety of measures including prevention, intervention and retention. To its credit, the Legislature also linked these measures with a renewed call for educators to spare nothing in the pursuit of every child's success: "With the development of rigorous academic standards in each discipline for each grade level, it is the expectation of the Legislature and the governor that all public school educators will do all that is necessary so that each pupil meets high academic standards" (AB 1626, Section 1, b).