Passing On Failure

Social promotion is alive and well in schools across the country.

"How is it that some students enter high school -- and even go on to graduate - without being able to read or do simple math?" John Cole, president of the Texas Federation of Teachers, says he is often asked that question, and he doesn't have any trouble with the answer. It happens because the students have been passed from grade to grade without being able to do the required work.

Social promotion, as this practice is known, is less popular than it used to be. It is even against the law in some places. Nevertheless, polls of teachers show that social promotion is alive and well in schools across the country. For example, according to a recent survey of Texas teachers,

• 68 percent of elementary school teachers had students who were promoted to the next grade level even though they had failed the class.

• 61 percent of middle school and junior high teachers had students who failed the course and were allowed to move on without repeating it.

• 40 percent said that a student they had recommended for retention was promoted.

• 78 percent disagreed with the statement that students in their school are not promoted unless they have earned the necessary passing grades.

These figures are stark, but other surveys, both national and state, tell a similar story of promoting students who are unprepared.

Supporters of social promotion justify it by talking about the stigma attached to being "kept back." They say that students who do not go on with their peers from grade to grade suffer a disastrous blow to their self-esteem and are likely to drop out of high school. Indeed, many people who went to school in the days before social promotion became standard practice remember the hulking 14-year-old who sat in the back of their sixth-grade class. Did being kept back do him any good? (And if he was a discipline problem, as was often the case, how did having him repeat the grade affect the learning of other students in the class?)

Recently, an economic argument for social promotion has also been put forward. It is very expensive to fail students and thus add a year, or more, onto their schooling. Undoubtedly this accounts in part for the willingness of some administrators to promote students whom teachers have tried to fail.

But if we are talking about the costs of retention to the students themselves and to society, we should also look at the costs of promoting students who have not met the minimum standards that most schools require. How hard are students likely to work when they learn, from the earliest grades, that they will pass no matter how little they do? What kind of preparation are they getting for real life, where bosses seldom reward substandard performance with promotion? And what about the cost to classmates who might be inclined to work if they didn't see that meeting the standards for promotion was unnecessary?

The harm of social promotion is compounded for children who make a slow start in school. If we promote elementary school students who have not learned to read, saying they will "catch up," they are likely to fall more and more behind until, by the time they reach middle school, catching up is nearly impossible. Will they feel good about themselves when they sit in class, as sophomores or juniors, unable to follow what is going on? If they hang around long enough to get a high school diploma, have they any hope of getting a permanent job that pays a decent wage? We are not doing these students a favor by passing them, even if they have not learned the work; we are cheating them.

The truth is, social promotion is a lousy idea. Standards only work if everybody can see that they mean something. If you have many, many failures, there will be tremendous political pressure to return to social promotion. To sustain the ability to hold students back, you must have a system of supports to keep failures low. But you must be willing to fail the students who don't meet standards, despite all you can do to help.

The best way to keep this from happening is to identify children who are not learning basic skills very early in their school career and offer them extra help before they fall behind and get used to failure. There are various ways of doing this. One-on-one tutoring with an expert teacher can turn children who were unable to sound out a word into confident readers. There are also full-scale programs that combine excellent in-class instruction with frequent diagnostic testing and daily tutoring sessions. Do interventions like these cost money? Of course, but even if you want to look at the issue in strictly economic terms, the dollar cost is far less than holding students back -- or sending them out into the adult world without the basic skills they need.