The end of Social Promotion?!?!
The Rolling Stones – In Another Land
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I follow a number of education bloggers, who are quick to point out the good, the bad, the ugly, the ridiculous, the hilarious, and the downright unjust within education today.
What caught my eye was a reference by Joanne Jacobs to some Denver schools that have changed their promotion policies to reflect student proficiencies rather than students age. Instead of moving up to the next grade level at the end of the year, students will be promoted based on the amount of proficiency they have demonstrated with their learning goals.
For those of us who are math teachers, this rings so true! After all, why is it that Cochran’s math results are abysmal? Well, a big portion of that is the fact that the majority of kids come to Cochran a few grade levels behind in their basic skills in math, and because math is so cumulative a subject, are never able to actually catch up. Put more bluntly, if you’re in 6th grade and can’t multiply, you’re basically dead in the water (although we’ve got potential beginnings of a remedy for this).
At some point, the kids of Los Angeles figure out that they don’t really need to do anything to move on up in the next grade level with their friends, thus transforming school into a social club, rather than the primary setting of gaining knowledge, wisdom, and experience. And it should be a simple fix, with a ten-year long term goal.
More any LAUSD policy makers out there, here’s how you’d do it. Next year, give the kindergarteners a test at the end of the year on kindergarten standards. Those who pass move on, those who don’t get another opportunity to learn it again in kindergarten, whilst learning the value of learning. The following year, do the same thing for kindergarteners and 1st graders. The following year, expand it to 2nd grade, etc… In a decade, you’ve got a system where kids get educated, kids understand content material, and kids value the learning and the balance of both fun and hard work involved in it.
Themocracy
LAUSD used to implement mandatory retention for students at the end of Grade 2. I believe that policy ended at or near the beginning of this decade. Some of middle-schoolers are products of that program. I’ve always felt that policy should expand to include Grade 5 in elementary schools (Grade 6 for those ES’s structured K-6). The rapscallions need to demonstrate some level of proficiency before they enter middle school.
How we integrate those kids into a remedial year of learning is ripe for discussion. Do we create wholly-contained remedial classes to address these children’s areas of deficiency? Or do we include them in regular general ed classes? What shape and form will the curriculum take? Certainly, the current arrangement of satisfactorily completing summer school as a way of promotion is not the answer. A student who is “not getting it” for 180 days during the school year and then “satisfactorily” completes 80 hours of summer school is then ready to enter the next grade level? C’mon! I don’t think so.
……And the beat goes on…..
In Minnesota, where whole families move to promote thier hockey sons, some folks want their boy-children held back, so they will be bigger and better coordinated than teammates when playing grade-level sports. Some were held back academically, which mostly helped the sports careers of those who were. Didn’t make them better readers, tho.
If you two can convince them to do this, LAUSD will need to hire back the RIFfed K-6 teachers and hire a slew more, to boot.
I was told in the beginning – 8 yrs ago – of my teaching career that it is a ‘warehouse’ issue. They don’t have space to hold failing students back.
From my own experience, I believe having those two oversized nonperformers in class motivated us NOT to do likewise.
Ive also seen that in the school I work at, kids aren’t held back especially if they are behavior problems because the school would have to deal with them for an extra year. While I agree that something needs to be done, there is already such a focus on test scores, I wish that we could look beyond a one day test to see if a student has learned something for the school year.
I know. It’s so frustrating. What’s even more frustrating is that those of us who are trying to establish some sort of “student accountability” are automatically labeled as those who are doing so only to relieve the amount of work on ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. Student accountability is actually good for students!