The Social Promotion Straw Man
Once again, the Journal Inquirer’s Chris Powell is way off the mark in his excoriation of teachers—and of the state of education in Connecticut in general.
Now, there’s a lot to address in Powell’s recent editorial—attacks on the CEA, a defense of standardized testing, and the use of decontextualized NAEP data, just to name a few. But for now, I want to address the issue of social promotion because it is such a frequent straw man of Powell’s.
According to Powell, social promotion is Connecticut’s unacknowledged “system,â€
the result of which is that a high school diploma in Connecticut “sets students on a path only to remedial English … at the state’s public universities.â€
Social promotion sounds like such a simple issue. Students should not be allowed to enter the next grade unless they have mastered the material presented in their current grade. Certainly, when I was a high school English teacher I heard frequent complaints that the middle school teachers engaged in wanton social promotion, thus making our jobs infinitely harder. The usually proffered solution is grade retention. Powell also supports standardized testing as an accountability measure for teachers.
In truth, however, like everything in the field of education, social promotion is a far more complex issue than it seems.
First of all, Connecticut’s students’ so-called lack of proficiency is relative. In fact, the results of the NAEP tests show that, at roughly 50%, Connecticut’s students have the highest rate of English proficiency in the country.
Rightly so, Powell will point out that this still means that half our students are not scoring at proficiency. And while this is accurate, Powell’s diagnosis of the situation and his suggested solutions are off the mark.
His additional claim that teachers offer no viable alternatives to social promotion is also completely inaccurate.
Clearly, Powell has not done his research.
For one thing, study after study has demonstrated that grade retention occurs inordinately to males, African-Americans, and the poor.
Secondly, study after study has demonstrated that grade retention not only fails to improve learning but actually leads to decreased achievement and increased dropout rates (and, ultimately, is a significant predictor of incarceration). Retention is terribly disruptive to students’ social connectedness and sense of self. Students who are retained become severely alienated from their peer groups and from school in general, especially in later grades and if retention occurs more than once.
Thirdly, grade retention is financially costly and impractical. The impact on scheduling alone would be a nightmare. Imagine scheduling an incoming kindergarten class when half of the previous year’s students are being retained.
Fourthly, grade retention produces myriad social problems, such as mixing older students with younger students, which becomes especially acute in the middle school years.
Lastly, educators, in fact, offer all sorts of suggestions for addressing the learning needs of students who do not perform at grade level proficiency. As opposed to promotion or retention, these approaches come under the label of intervention, and they include small class sizes, overlapped curriculum, aptitude grouping across similar grade levels, extended pre-school and kindergarten, tutoring, after-school and weekend programs, summer enrichment programs, and family and community literacy programs. Ideally, students remain with their age peers but receive one or more of these interventions.
The dilema is that these demonstrably successful intervention approaches are costly. Standardized testing, by contrast, is also costly but has no research to support its effectiveness. Testing merely assesses. But if we spend our scant resources on testing mechanisms, we have nothing left for intervention, and we will not be surprised when the tests show that students are below proficiency.
The research shows that if schools (and the state department of education) are going to invest in improving the learning of at-risk students, they would be wise to eschew the ineffectiveness of grade retention and the maddeningly high cost of standardized test development, administration, and preparation that Powell advocates, and instead they should invest in these proven intervention programs.
I’ll give you an example from Powell’s own backyard. As you likely know, recent legislation in Connecticut has made it illegal for community colleges to require students to take more than one year of developmental coursework. In short, the developmental coursework that used to be offered by the community colleges has been thrust back upon the high schools. In and of itself, this is fine, but high schools need to be supported in this.
So, about three years ago, using federal funds from a College Access Challenge grant, English Professor Steve Straight from Manchester Community College and English teacher Kelly Cecchini from Manchester High School developed a kegiatan that allows students at Manchester High to take a Developmental English course that mirrors MCC’s Developmental English course. This is a dual enrollment kegiatan that is, in a sense, a type of curriculum wrapping.
Since then, Kelly and Steve have developed and received approval for a credit-bearing English Composition course (English 101) that Kelly teaches at the high school for which the students receive MCC credit. This model is now being developed at other high schools in MCC’s service area, including Rockville, East Hartford, South Windsor, and EO Smith in Mansfield. Steve and Kelly are also working with me to help Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven develop a similar kegiatan with Gateway Community College, with the hope that it can become a model throughout the city. And, independent of us, educators in Bridgeport have developed a similar kegiatan between Housatonic Community College and both Central and Bassick High Schools.
So, does it work? Three years worth of data suggest that it does. Before the implementation of this program, fewer than 50% of all MHS students entering MCC qualified to enroll in English 101. Three years into this wrap around intervention, almost 70% of all MHS students entering MCC qualify for credit-bearing English.
So, teachers offer “no alternative to social promotion� There is “no mechanism for making diplomas meaningful� High school diplomas are “a path only to remedial English� Teachers only offer “touchy-feeling measures of student performance� Teachers merely want to “escape†accountability?
Mr. Powell, please look a little more closely. Pay attention to what’s going on in your own town. Do a little leg-work. Conduct a little research. Rather than rant against teachers, take up the cause of teachers. Help them advocate for research-based solutions, community support, and funding to provide the proven interventions their students need.
PS Anyone interested in the research on these issues might start with Russell Rumberger’s Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It.
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