Anti-’Social Promotion’ Bills Signed

Calling on public schools to overcome their fear of flunking children who fall behind, Gov. Pete Wilson on Wednesday signed legislation that he believes will end a “tragedy” that afflicts hundreds of thousands of California students: “social promotion.”

“No longer will promotion to the next grade be as automatic as a birthday,” Wilson told teachers, parents and students in Culver City.

The theory is simple: Instead of passing students along for fear of damaging their self-esteem, the governor said, schools must now ensure that they have mastered the course work. If necessary, low achievers will go to summer school or after-hours tutoring sessions.

If those steps fail, students may repeat a grade.

“Yes, some kids are going to be held back,” Wilson said. “And being held back in school can be painful for a while. But it’s nowhere near as painful as being held back from a good job or a college education.”

The Republican governor’s words echoed those of would-be school reformers of all political stripes from coast to coast. President Clinton, a Democrat, demanded an end to social promotions this year in his State of the Union speech. Long Beach and Chicago have attracted national notice for sending students to summer school. In Los Angeles, a task force plans to present a plan to curtail social promotions by year’s end.

Yet the very school the governor chose as a backdrop to announce the bill signings shows why it won’t be easy for educators to end social promotions.

At La Ballona Elementary, in some ways a model for the state, nearly one of every three students must go to summer school or get extra help before or after school.

But only two or three students each year are forced to repeat a grade, although the state’s standardized test last spring found that just one-third of La Ballona fourth-graders could read in English better than the national average. In part that’s because many students are still learning English.

For those students and others, said Principal Dale Petrulis, staying back a year is “a terrible option.”

What works best, Petrulis and many educators say, are remedial programs that seek to lift students up to par without delaying their 13-year march through the public school system.

That is just what the new state legislation, in two separate bills signed by Wilson, proposes to do.

The first new law, AB 1626 by Assemblyman Howard Wayne (D-San Diego), requires the State Board of Education to set minimum standards by the next school year for what students should know to be promoted to the next grade--and to link those standards to the new statewide testing program.

Local school districts, in turn, will be required to establish promotion and retention policies at five crucial transition points: from grade two to grade three; from three to four; from four to five; from elementary school to middle school; and from middle school to high school. In the earliest grades, reading and arithmetic are the key skills that students are expected to learn.

Finally, the law requires teachers to identify students who should be held back based on their test scores, class grades and other academic indicators. Teachers can then explain in writing why such students should not be retained or refer them to remedial classes to help them catch up.

Being asked to put their reasons on paper might deter teachers from citing self-esteem as a rationale for passing students. One fifth-grade teacher at La Ballona said Wednesday that she often worries about holding back students who are tall for their age, knowing that their height will make them feel out of place among younger classmates.

The second new law, AB 1639 by Assemblyman Michael Sweeney (D-Hayward), requires school districts to offer the remedial classes during school breaks, weekends or after school. Students with problems in reading, math and writing will get top priority. The state budget allotted $105 million for these remediation programs, on top of $50 million for other after-school programs. The money will be available starting with this school year.

Four mothers who attended the Wilson event said afterward that they strongly support ending social promotions. But their enthusiasm for summer school programs was much greater than their enthusiasm for making students repeat a grade.

“It can be unsettling to the child,” said Patti Schaub, who has a daughter in third grade. “It would be difficult, definitely very difficult.”

L.A. District Fashions Own Plan

Some experts say that holding students back a grade does more harm than good. Lorrie Shepard, an education professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said a large body of research, going back several decades, has found that students who are held back may do better at first, but generally decline in achievement in later years.

“That is very counterintuitive, very surprising,” said Shepard, who has studied student retention. “People just have a reflexive idea against social promotion, and it just does not stand up to what the research suggests.”

While researchers raise questions about the rush to stamp out social promotions, few policymakers are heeding them. Both bills that Wilson signed Wednesday passed unanimously in both houses of the Legislature.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, larger than any other in the state with 681,000 students, is forging ahead with its own anti-social promotion plan. Brad Sales, a spokesman for Supt. Ruben Zacarias, said a task force is expected to make recommendations that could begin to take effect in January.

Sales said the task force is wrestling with what standard to use for promoting students. “Where do you draw the line?” Sales asked--the 25th percentile on nationally standardized exams? The 36th? The 40th?

The national average, at the 50th percentile, would be an exceptionally high goal for a district such as Los Angeles Unified. Fourth-graders in the district scored on average at the 23rd percentile in reading on the state’s Stanford 9 test last spring.

However the district sets its goals, its teachers appear to favor curtailing social promotion. Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, proposed that the district start by insisting that all students show they can read by the end of third grade. Those that can’t, Higuchi said, shouldn’t move to fourth grade.

Whether parents will go along is another matter. Some parents in Compton are protesting that school officials have unfairly singled out their children for mandatory summer school.

“Parents will overwhelmingly endorse the idea,” Higuchi said, “except for when it’s their own children, in which case the parents will come and scream bloody murder, make threats, go to the school board. There’s parental pressure to promote students, or grade them easily, so they pass.”