Social Promotion Is Bad; Repeating a Grade May Be Worse

January 22, 1999

Social Promotion Is Bad; Repeating a Grade May Be Worse

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By ETHAN BRONNER

hen President Clinton announced in his State of the Union address this week that he wanted the federal government to press schools to end "social promotion," he was stepping into a longstanding, mine-laden educational debate: When students fail, is it better to have them repeat the grade or promote them to the next grade to keep them with their age group?
The president, in effect, is opting to hold them back. And while it may seem obvious that promoting failing students does no one any good -- giving parents and students false notions of their progress and forcing teachers to dumb down curriculums -- most studies argue against making pupils repeat grades.
Students held back once usually end up doing somewhat worse in school and have a smaller chance of graduating than equivalent students allowed to move to the next grade. And youngsters held back twice nearly always drop out.
Few advocate social promotion -- moving pupils from one grade to the next irrespective of their performance -- without remediation. But most researchers say the alternative of making them repeat the grade, known as retention, is worse.
"The term 'social promotion' carries so much emotion," commented C. Thomas Holmes, head of the department of educational leadership at the University of Georgia, who analyzed 63 studies on the issue. "It sounds like we're letting kids get away with things they didn't earn. But we are not stopping to ask what it is and what we could do to avoid it rather than outlaw it."
School systems have seesawed between the two policies for decades. Increasingly, educational researchers say that the choice is a false one and that what is needed is a third way: early identification of failing students and intensive intervention through one-on-one tutoring, after-school programs and summer school. But that costs a great deal of money.
The president and his education advisers are aware of the need, which is why they are also asking for a tripling of federal funds for summer school and after-school programs to $600 million.
The problem is that even this would cover only a small portion of what is needed nationally for such programs. The demand is greatest not in suburban schools, where one or two students per class might be held back each year, but in inner-city schools, where 10 to 15 percent of a class face retention.
Federal funds account for only about 7 percent of money spent on education around the country. And since federal funds go to the neediest schools, where failure is most common, some analysts are concerned that schools with high failure rates will stop social promotion, as demanded by the federal government, but will not obtain the funds or structure to help students who are held back. The result could be more harm than good.
"People think the argument against retention is that it hurts self-esteem," said Lorrie A. Shepard, a professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was co-editor of the book "Flunking Grades: Research and Policies on Retention" (Palmer Press, 1989). "My position is, yes, it hurts self-esteem, but I am not arguing against it on that basis. I am saying that there is already an enormous amount of it going on, and research shows that retention doesn't help achievement."
While most of the research supports Ms. Shepard's assertion, a study in the Baltimore public schools contradicts it. Karl Alexander, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, along with two co-authors, published "On the Success of Failure" (Cambridge University Press, 1994) in which he found that, on balance, retention was slightly preferable to social promotion.
The authors wrote, "Having children repeat a year can and does help academically; moreover, at least for children like those in Baltimore, it does not compromise self-regard." But they added that retention was no panacea, that "a lasting solution requires more than simply going over the same material twice."

Alexander added by telephone: "These kids start out far behind. For lots of them, retention stops the free fall."
His work also contradicts a 1980 study on the emotional effects of retention in which children said going blind or losing a parent were the only two life events that would be more stressful than being held back.

There are no good statistics on the number of students held back or promoted annually but reliable estimates are that by the eighth grade, between 20 and 50 percent of students have been held back once. Numbers beyond the eighth grade have less meaning because pupils are more often asked to repeat a course rather than an entire year.
The arguments against social promotion are many. The American Federation of Teachers issued a study in 1997 in which the group noted that if the United States is to move to more rigorous academic standards, social promotion has no place.
It said that social promotion harms youngsters, "who are deluded into thinking they have learned the knowledge and skills necessary for success," as well as teachers, "who must deal with impossibly wide disparities in their students' preparation and achievement" and "who face students who know that teachers wield no credible authority to demand hard work."
It also harms the business community, which has to invest millions of dollars in teaching new employees basic skills they should have learned in school, and taxpayers, whose support of public education is eroded, the report said.
But the union study added that retention was equally rampant and harmful. It too urged a comprehensive set of remedies, including rigorous standards, early intervention and well-trained specialists.

New York City has gone through both swings of this pendulum. In the late 1970s, Frank J. Macchiarola, who was school chancellor, sought to end social promotion through testing and retention combined with summer school. He says the policy was starting to work when he left office and his successor, Anthony J. Alvarado, put a stop to it. Others remember it as problematic, with a number of students forced to repeat grades two or three times.

One of the reasons retention nationally is likely to increase if Clinton's plan is put into place is the growing use everywhere of tests to move from one grade to the next. When there is a cutoff, many will not make it.
The president held up Chicago as a new model of a system ending social promotion and improving its students' test scores. But Ms. Shepard of the University of Colorado said much of the success comes from summers spent "teaching to the test," meaning that failing students are given drills aimed at helping them pass the tests. They may not actually be making much real progress, she said.
Marshall S. Smith, the deputy education secretary, acknowledged in a telephone interview that the president's plan, even if financed at the requested level, would fill only a small portion of the need for summer and after-school programs.

He said there were 15 to 20 applicants this year for every such available federal program and the number of applicants is likely to rise when word of increased funds gets out.
But he said it was important to see the ending of social promotion in the context of a number of steps being taken by the government, including reducing class size, pushing for school report cards so parents can choose better and improving teacher quality.
"We want people to be conscious of a whole approach, not just to knee-jerk into retention," Smith said. "Clearly, there are going to be bad practices in a country with 95,000 schools. But the federal government can influence states and local districts to have a policy which includes this general strategy."
Some educators are dubious.
"I'd be willing to discuss abandoning social promotion if we had year-round schooling or successful intervention," said Ronald O. Ross, superintendent of the Mount Vernon city schools, a heavily African-American system north of New York City. "We already know what we need to know about education, but we're not willing to put up the money. I'd like all these people to take a deep breath and think about a 6-year-old girl in first grade sitting next to a 10-year-old boy."

Theodore R. Sizer, former dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, who runs a charter school in western Massachusetts, said he is struck by what he considers the flawed diagnosis that what American children need is more and more testing.
"People with cancer often run high temperatures, but that doesn't mean what they need is aspirin," he said.

Educators also point to the fact that other countries do not hold back their pupils the way Americans do yet still have widely admired systems.
According to the 1994 International Encyclopedia of Teaching and Teacher Education, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan and South Korea all have automatic promotion policies, under which no pupil is held back.
Marc S. Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, an advocate of national standards who has studied the Danish system, said Danish pupils have the same teacher for the first six to nine years of school. Moreover, while high school in Denmark is quite rigorous, the first years of school are seen as more social than academic.

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