Ending Social Promotion

Californians are upset at their schools and are turning to various remedies to fix what they view as broken. One of the problems is social promotion, passing children to the next grade even when they have not mastered the current year’s work.

Orange County schools are wrestling with the new reality. The Legislature decreed an end to social promotion, but did not set a deadline. Still, many school districts in the county have decided this is the year they will hold students back in grades two through five and at the end of elementary and middle school.

Last fall a number of districts sent letters home, warning parents their children had to shape up academically. That’s a good starting point, providing warnings months in advance.

But it’s also important to offer help to struggling students. Summer school and after-school classes are needed. If those remedies fail, children forced to repeat a grade can’t be expected to do better just because they hear the same subject matter twice. They need individual attention and motivation.

Former Gov. Pete Wilson, who vowed to end social promotion, signed laws requiring the state to set minimum standards for what students should know to be promoted and setting aside money for remedial classes for failing students. In 2004 seniors will have to pass a standardized test to receive their diplomas.

Most Orange County districts are using class grades and tests, standardized Stanford 9 exams and writing samples to decide who moves up. It is important to set a target and let children and their parents know what it is. In the county’s two biggest districts, Garden Grove and Santa Ana, officials say they will not start holding many pupils back until at least 18 months of “intervention” efforts have a chance to take hold.

Officials began holding back students in Anaheim junior high schools last year. Nearly 600 eighth-graders who failed to achieve a C average were ordered to repeat. Officials say three-quarters of those repeating the year have raised their grades. A key weakness of most of the students repeating eighth grade is reading. That underscores the importance of getting children to read at grade level while they are young. Many educators believe that if they can’t keep up by age 10 they will always have trouble.

At Ball Junior High in Anaheim, about 125 students are enrolled in a special program to raise their grades to the C level. Classes have 25 pupils or fewer. Half a dozen teachers volunteered for the program and meet almost daily to discuss progress. The district will create an alternative high school for those whose grades don’t improve after a year of retention. The director of summer school for the Capistrano Unified School District said that while summer school once was akin to a summer camp, now it’s an extension of the school year.

There’s no doubt that students shouldn’t be promoted just because their classmates are. But there can be problems for those staying behind too. The importance of focusing on self-esteem has been much-debated, yet one way or another it comes into play when children are held back.

Boys and girls who see their friends move up from fourth grade to fifth, or from intermediate school to high school, while they are forced to repeat a year don’t feel good about themselves. They can give up on school, give up on themselves and drop out. The fear that holding a student back would put him on the path to leave school was common before social promotion.

Measuring progress and determining what works is important.

Although Orange County has not tracked the number of students retained, the county Education Department says those numbers now will be compiled. There have been developments on a number of fronts to improve education in the county and state.

Several school districts have passed bond measures in recent years to provide money to repair schools’ bricks and mortar. Gov. Gray Davis has pushed through the Legislature a tax credit for teachers. Class sizes have been reduced in several grades. These measures reflect the belief that California schools, once the best in the nation, now have fallen behind.

Schools also need to redouble efforts to ensure that parents are active participants in their children’s education. Parents need to see to it that homework is done; they need to emphasize the importance of schooling. When their children need extra help, it should be provided in a joint effort of parents and the schools.

Just leaving students back and ordering them to do better is not enough.