The Echo

3 comments:

Kilroy said...

I am sure there is a level of social promotion in Delaware however, with the mandatory retention associated with DSTP it’s less. However, retention is a no win unless there is effective intervention.

June 30, 2009 at 10:32 AM

Elizabeth Scheinberg said...

Kilroy,
I 've heard from teachers that it is.

I have personal knowledge of two incidences of social promotion in Christina, as shared with me by families. In one incident, the family asserts that they were told that Christina did not retain students, despite the fact that the parents requested retention. In the second incident, the family states that they participated in an IEP where all agreed to retain the child and then received documentation from the school that clearly states the child would progress to the next grade level.

I am curious as to whether parents feel that it's a widespread issue in CSD. I look forward to learning Christina's retention policies as a new board member and sharing them here in my blog.

Thanks for stopping by!

June 30, 2009 at 4:15 PM

Steve Peha said...

A SOLUTION FOR SOCIAL PROMOTION

Clearly, the practice of social promotion causes many problems. Whether it’s an officially sanctioned process, or one that teachers have merely become accustomed to, social promotion undermines student achievement and teacher morale.

But now let’s look at the situation from where a principal or superintendent might sit. What would happen if we instantly combined high expectations and more rigorous curriculum with accurate grading in low-achieving schools? Over 3-5 year’s time we’d see over-crowded elementary schools and near-empty high schools. Logistically, this is a non-starter. Hence, the culture of social promotion has a practical, albeit pernicious, aspect.

Now, logistical reasons are no excuse for such a heinous practice. But this conundrum does bring to mind a very serious and important issue: we can’t structure out way out of reform. Testing, standards, charters, vouchers, and merit pay are all structural reforms. But school, being the slippery beast that it is, defies restructuring.

Our only hope is to teach our way out.

But we can be even more thoughtful than that. If we acknowledge that literacy is the foundation of academic success, and if we acknowledge the brain window for language learning, and if we acknowledge the traditions of elementary school teaching and the natural separation of instructional styles that seems to occur after 3rd grade, we can make simple plans for solid interventions early enough in kids’ lives that strategies like social promotion would be unnecessary.

There are two key places to intervene in a young student’s learning life: at the beginning of 1st grade and at the end of 3rd. It is perfectly reasonable to get kids extra help in the first half of first grade if they are not yet reading and writing independently. And it is perfectly reasonable to retain less successful 3rd graders for an additional year if they have not yet become confident chapter book readers and conventional writers of multi-paragraph essays.

At the same time, we can do several things that make intervention and retention much less likely. First of all, we could concentrate professional development in literacy at the primary grades. Bringing teachers of young children up to speed with the latest and best methods like Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop would improve outcomes tremendously. Second, we can move our most successful teachers to first and third grade. And finally, we can employ the use of high quality early interventions like Reading Recovery for kids who are struggling out of the gate.

The root cause of social promotion is not poor kids, it’s poor teaching. Until we recognize the connection here and actually do something about it, schools with many under-performing children have no logistically sound approach but to pass kids along year after year. This reality does not excuse what is surely a detestable behavior but seeing it for what it is and why it exists should heighten for all of us the importance of making sure our teaching – especially in literacy at the early grades – needs a serious overhaul.

July 7, 2009 at 3:35 PM