Wrestling with Retention

School Administrator, August, 1998 by Karen E. Devries, Carl A. Cohn

Long Beach Unified School District takes a new tack to enforce its K-8 promotion standards

If you're a conscientious school administrator in America today, you probably cringe every time you pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to find some know-it-all politician talking about how "ending social promotion" is the answer to all of our problems in public schools today.

Your concerns might center on the preponderance of research suggesting that social promotion doesn't work or the common-sense knowledge that repeating the same work while expecting different results is far-fetched. Or perhaps you fear that holding back many students for a year will expose your school or school district to angry parents and critics, who believe that such efforts punish kids while holding adults blameless.

For the past two years, the leadership of the Long Beach, Calif., Unified School District has initiated a courageous conversation with parents, teachers, school administrators and community members about the difficult task of ensuring students are academically prepared to move from one level to the next. This conversation, which has been spearheaded by the district's three area superintendents, has resulted in key systemwide interventions designed to guarantee academic preparedness for students in this large, diverse urban school system.

The first task force tackled the critical area of making sure we teach all kids to read in a timely manner. The second focused on what to do with youngsters who consistently fail middle school courses and then move on unprepared to high school. And the third examined the entire area of K-8 promotion standards and what additional checkpoints for student progress should be established. This article describes the work of the latter task force and how it went about arriving at a final set of K-8 promotion standards, which were adopted unanimously by the Long Beach board of education last winter.

Creating a Policy

In September 1997 a task force was assembled to determine the likely impact of implementing a retention policy on the capacity of the organization. This task force was chaired by one of the three K-8 area superintendents, who brought together a core group of administrators, central-office support staff, teachers and parents from previously established 3rd Grade and 8th Grade Initiative committees. Task force membership also was solicited widely from schools and surrounding communities. A dedicated group of nearly three dozen members met over a four-month period.

From the first meeting, task force discussions were lively. Although each meeting had an agenda with time devoted for open discussions, teachers and parents all wanted to share their deeply held beliefs about retention. By the third meeting, a rhythm was established: each meeting began with a discussion of one or two articles about research on retention and/or district data, followed by committee reports and ending with group consensus on key points:

* Retention programs would not be a repeat of services but provide a significantly different academic experience for retained children;

* Multiple measures, based on proficiency with content standards, would be used for retention criteria;

* Interventions would be prescribed at key, nonretention grades to ensure all children would have every opportunity to attain grade-level standards.

One area of lively discussion centered on the issue of kindergarten retention. This followed data showing that most student retentions came at the end of kindergarten and/or 1st grade. What did that mean? Is a half-day kindergarten program and one year of 1st grade sufficient to make such a major decision?

Our task force discovered we were better at collecting kindergarten data on social behaviors rather than academic progress. We needed to document academic growth of reading skills over time.

Consensus was reached when the task force decided to establish kindergarten as a key intervention checkpoint but not a retention grade. Preschool and kindergarten content standards then would send a clear signal to parents and teachers that the kindergarten experience was critical for students to establish early literacy skills and reach grade-level proficiency by 3rd grade.

Plenty of Questions

As the task force worked toward a consensus on its social promotion recommendations to the school board, we addressed these questions:

* Which grades will be used as the key checkpoints for retention?

* What timeline is reasonable for implementing both retention and intervention policies? How much can school sites take on and perform effectively?

* How will we systematically document our intervention efforts over time?

* What criteria will be collected that will provide the best information for improving teaching decisions?

* How will we train teachers to collect and use these data?

* What accommodations will we make for students in special education and those learning English as a second language?

* What will programs look like to ensure we don't repeat a grade?