In School, Making Up Is Hard to Do

My K-12 education came in both small-town and urban schools. Lots of things were different from city to country, but one thing stayed the same: There was no bigger stigma than being held back a grade.

Given the social nature of the school yard, flunking was the ultimate ostracism. Your classmates moved on; you didn’t. Suddenly, you needed a whole new group of friends. Not always that easy to do.

Forget Nathaniel Hawthorne: the scarlet letter wasn’t “A,” it was “F.”

That’s why it’s surprising today, as a relative oldster, to see that holding students back (a more palatable euphemism) is in vogue.

The Times reported this week that more than 5,000 Orange County students are being retained this fall. While comparative figures for last year aren’t available, some individual districts report that retention rates are several times what they were last year.

School officials aren’t saying that retention is a panacea. However, by endorsing it they are saying they don’t equate it with doing damage--psychological, emotional or social--to the unfortunate youngster involved.

But is that true?

Does repeating a grade not carry the social embarrassment it once did? If it doesn’t, then retaining a student doesn’t have nearly the down side that I fear it might.

I queried a fifth-grade teacher in Santa Ana who’s relatively new to the district and who has retained three students in more than 10 years of teaching. Because I solicited her opinion, I agreed to her request for anonymity.

“The stigma from a child’s point of view is the same as it was a thousand years ago,” she says. “It hurts their self-esteem, pride and makes them feel bad. The last few years, there’s really been a push from the top to retain kids that don’t pass the district’s standards test. I don’t know whether to blame the districts or even higher than that. They don’t seem to worry about the stigma or self-esteem of the child.”

The stigma of retention is only one side of the equation. On the other side is the desire on everyone’s part that the student be academically prepared to move to the next grade.

Believe me, I understand that. So does the teacher to whom I spoke.

Is There Any Benefit?

But what strikes me about the burgeoning number of retained students is that somewhere along the line, someone must have determined that the stigma isn’t that big a deal. Or that if it is a big deal, it is trumped by the need to bolster the student’s academic standing.

That’s a reasonable counter-argument, if you take as gospel that retention actually helps.

I pose that to my teacher.

She says there’s a fair amount of research on retained students that says “they’re not going to do better anyway. They’re not going to get division better than the year before.”

Having said that, she says she doesn’t favor automatic advancement. It’s just that she’s looking for an answer somewhere between the two unpleasant choices.

“I understand the push to retain, but I don’t accept it,” she says. “I wish [people] would understand that classes can be more creative and progressive, and we can meet the needs of individual students and move them along from the level they’re at.”

To help students who are lagging, she ticks off alternatives like after-school help, tutoring or tailored programs within the confines of the regular day’s classroom.

“As educators, we have to be really sensitive and realize no matter what grade level we’re in, we have a span of abilities [in the students],” she says. In her fifth-grade classes, she has had students with abilities ranging from second grade to eighth grade, she says.

In the headlong rush to retain more students than ever, I’d like to think that state and local officials have made a collective, informed decision that such impacts are worth it.

But I wonder.

I feel much more comfortable listening to the fifth-grade teacher I sought out. “At each school, there’s definitely a different culture,” she says. “Here, we work together as a team. I had a fourth-grader last year who probably should have been retained--and he still may--but we passed him and gently gave him to the next teacher.”

Why did you handle it that way, I ask.

“Because,” she says, “he would have been devastated if he’d been the only fourth-grader who was held back.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.