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 should be the role of parents? What about skipping grades? International attitudes towards retention? What is the evidence for and against keeping students back?

Jerry McArthur of Fargo, ND, asks : Are there statistics on how many schools have programs that identify and help students who are having trouble and can we train our teachers to handle this task while they are juggling so may others?   Lorrie Shepard, University of Colorado, responds: There are national data available on the numbers of students being served in through Head Start, Title I reading programs, special education, and other federally funded programs. In addition, many states and districts have their own special programs. Yet, we know that these resources are still too few and spread too thin to provide high quality education to students who are at risk for academic failure. For example, Head Start reaches only a small fraction of the children who are qualified for services according to the program's criteria; and even with all of these programs in place we know that 40% of 4th graders are not performing at even the Basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Teacher training will help, and indeed one of the goals of standards-based reform is to help teachers learn to teach more rigorous curricula in ways that help students "make sense" of difficult material rather than trying to memorize what they can't understand. Yet, as you suggest, teachers are already being asked to do much more than their counterparts of 10 or 20 years ago. That's why the issues of cost and the willingness of policy makers to invest in education are so critical. The Tennessee class size study is a case in point. This was a long-term, large-scale randomized experiment that showed significant achievement gains for students in smaller classes, and what's more these gains were sustained into later grades even when students were no longer in small classes. One of the ironies we discovered in studying retention is that school administrators often lack the funds to provide special help to students who are struggling yet they can afford the high cost of retention, which costs about $5,700 per student. Because annual budgets are based on the total number of students regardless of grade level, and no one is held accountable for the cost of 14 years of education instead of 13, school administrators find it difficult to redirect the cost savings from not retaining students to interventions that would be of more direct benefit. In this respect it is important that President Clinton and other politicians say that they want to end both social promotion and grade retention, because it will take attention at the policy level to commit resources for summer school programs, intensive reading help, tutoring, and reduced class size. Unfortunately, when policy makers fall short on their promises, retention becomes the default policy and students suffer. References: Byrnes, D. A. (1989). Attitudes of students, parents, and educators toward repeating a grade. In L. A. Shepard & M. L. Smith (Eds.), Flunking Grades: Research and Policies on Retention. London: Falmer Press. Heubert, J. P., & Hauser, R. M. (Eds.) (1999). High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Holmes, C. T. (1989). Grade level retention effects: A meta-analysis of research studies. In L. A. Shepard & M. L. Smith (Eds.), Flunking Grades: Research and Policies on Retention. London: Falmer Press. Karl Alexander, Johns Hopkins, responds: If there are such statistics, Jerry, I’m not aware of them. There are guides that try to help the parties involved make good decisions– I mentioned above, for example, Grant and Richardson’s “Retention/Promotion Checklist”-- but I have to say that the lack of good, reliable information on a matter of such importance is a serious concern. In general, these are local responsibilities here in the U.S.– we don’t have a national curriculum, national standards for teacher training and certification, and certainly not national standards for promotion/retention (as an aside, our emphasis on local standards is vastly different from most of the industrialized world, where typically the curriculum, standards for teacher training and certification, and tests for assessing student competence are developed by a centralized Ministry of Education and standardized throughout the country). Local control of schooling clearly is an important cultural value for us, but this makes it hard to gather good information that is comparable from place-to-place, and hard to implement reforms. Numerous teacher surveys show that they feel grade retention has its uses and can help-- they don’t want to see it eliminated as an option-- and of course it is teachers who are on the front line when we ask them to manage classes in which the reading level might span 3, 4 or even 5 grade levels. Your question identifies a serious need-- to help teachers who are chronically overburdened-- but I’m not sure we’re very far along in finding solutions. Still, there are promising developments. Bob Slavin (also here at Hopkins), for example, has developed a comprehensive classroom reform model that he calls “Success for All.” It weaves together age-appropriate curriculum materials (along with intensive teacher training on thieir use), cooperative learning, parental involvement, frequent assessment and feedback on curriculum mastery, and supplemental services, including one-on-one tutoring. The goal is to help children keep up all along, so that there is less need later for draconian measures like retention. Surely that’s what all of us want, but until we get there, some children will continue to struggle and someone has to figure out how best to help them. Simply passing them along regardless of their mastery of the curriculum isn’t the answer, but neither is traditional grade retention, at least not for most children under most circumstances.