Passing Along a Problem?

It was, in too many ways, a bad year for the teachers of Ukiah High School.

For English teacher Pat Alto, it started in September with the discovery that several of her seniors could not construct a simple sentence.

For history teacher Philip Boynton, it was the Fs he passed out to a dozen students, half of them freshmen, this spring.

In all, more than 40% of Ukiah’s freshmen failed at least one course in the first quarter of the year, and 13% failed three or more. For the proud faculty of this distinguished Northern California school, it was too shocking to ignore.

Why, they asked with wearying frequency, were so many youths arriving in their classrooms unprepared for high school work?

The teachers believed they knew what to blame--and decided to let this Mendocino County town in on the awful secret.

“The problem,” 75 teachers wrote in a quarter-page ad published in the local newspaper last month, “is the inability of some schools to set and enforce academic and disciplinary standards.”

In other words, Ukiah’s junior high and elementary schools were passing students who could not read, write or compute at the appropriate level--a “terrifying problem,” the teachers charged, that would destroy effective public education in their town.

In flinging the issue out for public scrutiny, the teachers stepped into a national debate over social promotion--advancing students on the basis of age and attendance, not achievement.

Although the practice isn’t new--it has gone in and out of fashion for at least 60 years--the will to eradicate it has become a recurring feature of education reform in the last few years.

From agricultural towns such as Ukiah to urban centers such as Long Beach, Rochester, N.Y., Cincinnati, Chicago and Miami, districts have begun eliminating social promotions and strengthening teachers’ and principals’ authority to hold students back.

Attacking the policy has become politically correct. Gov. Pete Wilson has called for an end to social promotions as part of his education reform campaign. President Clinton urged governors at a recent national education summit to mandate promotional tests.

But ending social promotions is not as simple as its critics make it sound. Few districts have consistent grading practices or clear goals for each grade level. Only five states--Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia--require students to pass a test to be promoted.

“What that means is that at the end of the year students get promoted, but based on what?” said Ruth Wattenberg, deputy director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers.

The debate also raises sticky questions of accountability. Whose fault is it if a child has not mastered the skills and knowledge expected of him or her in a given year? Is it the child’s for not trying, or the teacher’s for a job poorly done?

“Teachers have been crying for years and years that we don’t want social promotion . . . but it’s not necessarily painless to come to grips with,” said Tom Mooney, president of the teachers union in Cincinnati, where the school board voted in 1991 to abolish the practice. Social promotion, teachers complain, forces them to water down the curriculum and spend more time disciplining students who act up because they can’t do the work.

Yet many educators fear the alternatives. The most controversial is retention--making students repeat the year they failed--which studies have shown increases chances they will drop out later.

Simply retaining students also could clog the system, a Florida education official said recently, leading districts to “building parking lots in middle schools for kids who are not ready to move up.”

Envisioning the impracticalities of ending social promotion is not hard in the huge Los Angeles Unified School District. Among its 650,000 students, fewer than 1% of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders were held back in the 1994-95 school year, despite an estimated 30% who had Ds or Fs in one or more academic subjects.

Failing students do not suffer any real consequences until high school, when graduation requirements are based on credits earned by passing courses. “That’s a little bit too little too late,” said John Liechty, the district director of middle school instruction and a critic of social promotion.

Surveys suggest the practice is widespread. One-third of 805 teachers polled nationwide by the American Federation of Teachers last year said at least 20% of their pupils should not have been promoted to their class; among urban teachers, 49% said they had students who had been socially promoted.

Schools are most inclined to hold a student back in the primary grades, when developmental differences strongly affect the pace at which young children learn.

For older children, the decision to socially promote is often based on the undeniable signs of physical maturity: A student who is a year older and a head taller than his or her classmates sticks out and may be taunted.

Yet some experts say the extent to which social promotion is practiced is vastly overstated.

Analyzing recent data from 13 states and the District of Columbia, professors Lorrie Sheperd of the University of Colorado and Mary Lee Smith of Arizona State University determined that 5% to 7% of public school children--or about two students in every classroom of 30--are held back each year. Even allowing for students who repeat more than one grade, that would mean that more than 50% of ninth-graders have been held back at least once--a non-promotion rate as high as 100 years ago, before social promotion existed.

Automatic promotion is an outgrowth of the progressive education movement of the 1930s, which emphasized the need to accommodate individual differences in the classroom to educate all American children. That philosophy led educators to the belief that retention could harm self-esteem and emotional adjustment and push some children out of school.

Today, defenders of the practice can cite a large body of evidence to support those claims. For instance, a 1984 University of Utah study found that children considered repeating a grade more stressful than anything short of blindness or a parent’s death.

And experience with retention has led some districts to conclude that it is academically counterproductive. In 1990, New York’s chancellor of public schools revised a decade-old policy that required retention of fourth- and seventh-graders who read more than 1 1/2 years below grade level, after finding they had higher dropout rates than youths allowed to move on.

A review of more than 60 controlled studies supports New York’s experiences, demonstrating that low achievers who were promoted performed as well as or better in subsequent grades than those who were kept back.

“That is very counter-intuitive,” Sheperd said. She speculated that retention backfires because it causes emotional adjustment problems that impair performance or because of deficiencies in the academic program that retained youngsters are forced to repeat.

At the heart of the Ukiah teachers’ complaint is their contention that standards are too low at the district’s junior high schools, where students are required to accrue only 18 credits out of a possible 28 to enter high school. That means a student could flunk nearly all of his or her eighth-grade courses and still advance. And many are arriving at Ukiah High with that bare minimum.

Raising that minimum is at the top of the high school teachers’ demands. They also want to require junior high students to earn a passing grade in core classes, tighten summer school makeup policies, and create a special school for those who flunk junior high.

The teachers’ letter has caused hard feelings among Ukiah’s educators. Administrators say it casts too harsh a light on the 6,000-student district, which still scores above average on state and national achievement tests. And, even though most agree that social promotion is a problem, elementary and junior high teachers say the letter unfairly blamed them for the lapse in standards.

“Some teachers felt betrayed,” said Yokayo Elementary School teacher Jenny Davinny. “They’re trying hard and [someone says] they’re doing a horrible job.”

But the high school teachers say they do not fault their fellow teachers; it is the system they want to change. Current practices, they argue, send the wrong message: that students don’t have to work hard to get through school.

Freshman Feather Fallis, 14, is one who got that message. She entered Ukiah High last fall having shrugged off much of the previous year of junior high.

“I knew exactly how many credits I needed” to graduate, she said. “After that, I just goofed off. I was late, cutting classes. Teachers threatened me. But I knew I was going to graduate.”

Ukiah High ninth-grader Jose Vasquez said he might have studied harder if he had been required to pass all his junior high classes. His report cards were littered with poor grades, a pattern he has begun to reverse in a special program that offers more individualized attention.

“They’re not helping us out by promoting us,” said Jose. “They give up on you at a certain point . . . and they let you go.”

Many teachers, however, say the pressure to promote is fierce. Fifty-two percent of teachers in the American Federation of Teachers survey cited parental pressure as a major reason failing students are advanced.

“I thought it would just be too hard on him emotionally,” said a Los Angeles mother who rejected her school’s recommendation that her son repeat the third grade next year. “I would have found another place for him if they pushed it.”

Without parental approval, said Los Angeles Unified’s Liechty, “there is no point in retaining. I’ve seen it happen: All of a sudden the youngster checks out of your school, then resurfaces six months later--in the grade he wasn’t supposed to be in.”

Teachers say they often don’t push the issue because they fear the administration won’t back them. “If too many get held back, then it looks like something is wrong with the school,” said Daryl Barnett, a teacher at Paul Revere Junior High School in Brentwood.

Because so many factors contribute to academic failure, retaining a student is not an easy decision to make.

“The problem is not social promotion per se. That is just a small piece of the puzzle,” insisted Barnett, a 20-year classroom veteran. “The problem is lack of standards, not enough remediation classes, people who aren’t attuned to learning-disabled kids, teachers who let them slide on without expectations. The problem is money, the problem is 40 kids in a class. The problem is the social structure of society. Maybe the mother is never there.”

Barnett says she has a student who could be a candidate for retention, but she is loathe to press the case. The sixth-grader seems bright, but has failed every test this year, does not turn in homework, is absent at least twice a week and, when there, disrupts the class. She failed most of her subjects in fifth grade, too.

But she has emotional problems and lives with her grandmother in an unstable home. “There’s no mom, no dad. Like, oh, my God, now I’m going to leave her back, too?” said Barnett, who fears that retaining the student may do little more than create a discipline problem for another teacher.

Despite their exasperation with a system that passes the unqualified, few critics of social promotion want to see retentions rise. Most districts that are reexamining their policies are turning to strategies to help students avoid that fate.

“We were not proposing that a student be retained to do the same thing that didn’t work the first time around,” said Adam Urbanski, president of the teachers union in Rochester, where teachers successfully campaigned against social promotion last year.

Now, that district is emphasizing a variety of techniques to help a student catch up. They include peer tutoring and multi-age and smaller groupings during regular school hours, and intensive instruction before and after school and on Saturday mornings. In addition, eighth-graders who are failing must make up the work in summer school before they can go to high school. About 400 students face that prospect this summer.

In Long Beach, two proposals are expected to be approved by the school board this fall that will stop the promotion of students who lack essential skills. Starting next year, students not reading at grade level by the end of third grade would be required to attend a summer tutorial program.

Supt. Carl Cohn estimates that as many as 40% of the district’s third-graders--about 2,000 children--could be eligible. In addition, eighth-graders who flunk multiple subjects would be barred from high school until they bring their skills up in an alternative school. Last year, about 683 eighth-graders--about 12%--were promoted even though they failed more than two subjects.

In Cincinnati, district officials have adopted the “promotional gates” concept, which says that at certain grade levels--third, sixth and eighth--students must demonstrate mastery of specified skills and knowledge to move up. Students can be retained once if they fail to meet the exit requirements, said spokeswoman Monica Curtis.

Those who fall short a second time are assigned to a remedial class with students who are the same age. They can enter the ninth grade as soon as they master the skills they lack.

In Ukiah, a few teachers fret that tougher promotion standards will leave some students out in the cold. And others argue that it defines the problem of school failure too narrowly. “How much have kids missed because of the shortage of qualified teachers?” asked one of eight Ukiah High teachers who refused to sign the letter.

Supt. Charles G. Myers shares the view that attacking social promotion only addresses a part of the problem. “We certainly should have standards and expectations that are high,” said Myers, who has authorized a district task force to study the issue. “But many times we look for very simple solutions to very complex problems. I think that is what is happening here.”

At the high school, Boynton, the history teacher, regrets that some of his colleagues feel hurt or that they misunderstood the teachers’ intentions. But he is hopeful that good will come of their decision to speak out. He sees too many kids who are frustrated, mouth off and act up because they lack skills they should have mastered long before entering his classroom.

“This is not a game to us. It is our way of saying we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing for kids in this valley,” he said. “It’s safe to say we’re desperate.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Promoting the Unprepared

Social or automatic promotion--the practice of promoting students who have failed to master their grade’s required skills and knowledge--is done for a variety of reasons, according to a nationwide survey of 805 teachers last year:

* Belief that retention causes discipline problems: 61%

* Belief that retention doesn’t help student: 61%

* Pressure from principal: 58%

* No alternatives to retention: 52%

* Pressure from parents: 52%

* Limit on retentions: 50%

* No rules or standards: 44%

* Retention banned in some grades: 41%

NOTE: The survey was conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates last October for the American Federation of Teachers. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5%.