FAILING TO EDUCATE?

February 1999
		The Clinton administration has proposed a ban on social promotion. Should failing students be forced to repeat a grade?

What can a parent do to help? International attitudes towards retention? What is the evidence for and against keeping students back? How can teachers identify and help failing students?

Franklin Chavies of Himyar, Kentucky, asks : I attended school in the 30's and was considered very smart and was promoted ahead of my other classmates several times in the early years which made the rest of my schooling very hard. Are there studies on skipping grades? Do they have any bearing on the issue of promoting students who are not having such an easy time? Karl Alexander, Johns Hopkins, responds: So far as I know there’s not much research on how skipping grades affects children, and that’s unfortunate. There are studies that show acceleration has positive effects on achievement, but I’m not familiar with studies that consider how children who are much younger than their classmates fare socially and emotionally. A colleague of mine here at Hopkins, Julian Stanley in the Psychology Department, has been at the forefront of developing enrichment experiences for extremely bright middle-schoolers, and his programs attend very carefully to these children’s social needs. Stanley’s interventions, though, are supplementary to children’s regular schooling– they take place after school, on weekends, and during the summer. This problem of being "out of synch" may be a particular concern during adolescence, when “fitting in” is so important. And perhaps it weighs on repeaters and accelerated children alike-- repeaters who are older, and accelerated students who are younger. In fact, research by Melissa Roderick, reported in her book “The Path to Dropping Out,” suggests that being overage for grade may help explain some portion for the association between grade retention and dropout– a relationship that is well established in the literature and cause for concern. Roderick’s research finds that children who were held back in the primary grades are at elevated risk of dropout, but so too are children who started school late (so-called “academic redshirts), who also would be older than their classmates when they get to high school and can legally leave school. This suggests to me that the social side of schooling plays an important role-- children who are not fitting in comfortably AND have other options may well avail themselves of those options. Lorrie Shepard, University of Colorado, responds: As your question implies, there are interesting parallels between repeating grades and skipping. Both practices derive from a factory model of schooling developed early in this century as cities were faced with educating massive numbers of students migrating from rural areas and from abroad. According to this model, which works like a factory assembly line, both "laggards" and "precocious pupils" were problems that had to be eliminated because they didn't fit the standard curriculum aimed at the average pupil. Skipping is rarely used in public schools today and has been such an uncommon practice for decades that I know of no studies investigating its effects. The idea of skipping students fell into disfavor for both academic and social reasons. First, high achieving students are usually more than one grade level ahead in their strongest subject (usually reading). Should they be skipped more than one grade? At the same time, students who skip have gaps in their knowledge from the curriculum they missed. Second, students who skip often have difficulty adjusting socially. The parallels, which would likewise argue against retention, are striking. Students who are retained are typically behind by different amounts in their weakest and strongest subjects, yet repeating a grade is a uniform corrective that treats all subject areas the same. A fifth grader could be two years behind in reading, should he go back to third grade? What about math where he is only 6 months behind? Retention is also known to carry a social stigma, which may have a negative effect on student motivation and achievement. An important difference between skipping and repeating is that schools have turned to curriculum enrichment and gifted and talented programs as a means of addressing the learning needs of high achieving students while keeping them in their normal grade placement. Because of beliefs in this country that equate automatic promotion with lax standards, however, schools have not been as effective in providing special programming for below-average learners.