Can We Really Cut Out Social Promotion?
I opened up my Google rss reader the other day, and saw this headline - Extending Requirement to Advance in Scool. According to the article, Mayor Bloomberg is planning to increase the requirements for students to graduate eighth grade and head on to ninth grade - therefore raising for bar for achievement in high school.
It seems like a great idea, but can we really end social promotion... just by increasing "requirements?"
One problem to tackle is - how many students can you hold back? The article suggests that roughly a quarter of eighth graders would fall in the category where they could be retained for an extra year of eighth grade.
Is that too much? And how do you ensure that this doesn't create a new segregation and divide, where the most able and "advantaged" students can pass on, while the disadvantaged students are held back several times in their schooling career?
Still, as I look out at my own high school, something needs to be done. It's somewhat absurd that a student can "pass" every year up to 10th grade and still read on a third grade level. Many of them then expect to pass on to 11th grade, because that's what they've been doing for years.
The article suggests that previous increases in graduation requirements have helped at the third, fifth, and seventh grade levels. So perhaps adding more requirements at the eighth grade level will help, too - especially as it is part of a graded effort, starting in elementary school and working to high school.
It would probably be more of a disaster if a district tried to implement this plan starting with eighth grade - without looking back to see who was being graduated from fifth grade.
The one thing I do like about the plan is it helps re-focus the conversation about student achievement and progress. Last week, I sat through an inservice on vertical articulation. Great plan, I thought, but I was struck by how the presenter emphasized the idea that if only we planned everything together... all of our students would be ready for the AP test come 12th grade.
This essentially absolves the students of all ownership and responsibility for their education. If the administration and the faculty plan everything and integrate it perfectly, the only result is success.
Success - and failure - is a two person effort. A student will succeed to the extent that both the student and teacher are committed to it.
Bloomberg's plan reflects this to some extent, because it suggests that students can't graduate until they've demonstrated a gain in knowledge and skills - which pre-supposes that there was some kind of connection between the student and teacher. Now we just need to be careful that this doesn't trend too far in the other direction, blaming students entirely for their own failure.
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