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. In Canada and the United States, this practice is only used in the elementary and middle school level. 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 middle school, high school, college and the workforce.

1 Common arguments against and for social promotion
- 1.1 Arguments against social promotion
- 1.2 Arguments for social promotion
2 Statistics
3 History
4 Studies
5 Alternatives
6 Further reading
7 External links
8 References

[edit] Common arguments against and for social promotion

The following are common arguments regarding this practice.

[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.

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, but reasonable estimates based on census data suggest that nationally, as many as one-third of all students have been retained at least once by the time they reach high school. For boys and minorities, retention is even more common. Nationally, by 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 whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, but 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.

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."

Studies clearly show that early retention - 3rd grade and earlier - is harmful. Students retained in first grade do worse than expected, both academically and emotionally. There is also substantial evidence that retention in kindergarten is equally harmful. Being removed from a group of peers with whom a student has just gotten comfortable seems to compound the difficulty of adjusting to school and to set the child back rather than help. Among other reasons, students at a young age do not "choose" to be poor learners.

For other grades, the research is mixed. A few well-designed studies have found that retained students do better academically and feel better about themselves and about school during the first one to three years after retention. Consistent with the Chicago findings reported here, the biggest advantage was found in a district that identified students early, attempted to avoid retention through re-mediation, and gave special assistance to retained students. Even there, as in other studies, the advantage for retained students declined each year and washed out altogether after three years. Other studies have found that retention either offers no advantage or actually harms students. Taken together, the studies find that simple retention -- retention without efforts at prevention and special assistance for those retained -- is especially risky.

At least 55 studies show that when flunked students are compared to socially promoted students, flunked students perform worse and drop out of school at higher rates; when other factors are controlled for, the dropout rate was 70 percent more for those held back one grade. For those held back two or more grades, the dropout rate is nearly 100%. Grade retention is a statistically better predictor of dropping out, drug use, and criminal behavior than social-economic status.

[edit] Alternatives

Simple social promotion did not prove to be an adequate alternative to grade retention. Current theories among academic scholars prefer to address underperformance problems with remedial help. Students who qualify for special education can receive such remediation through that program. However, performing easier work does not necessarily help the learning disabled student acquire the skills that are vital for middle school, high school, college and the workforce. The needs of underperforming students who do not qualify is met in the alternative school. Ironically, 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