Earning the Promotion

For many Orange County students, summer means not the beach or round-the-clock video games but summer school. Some are there to get a leg up on the new academic year, but more than 20,000 are back in classrooms because they are struggling with reading, writing and math.

Schools, parents and students are coming to terms with a year-old state law banning social promotion, the misguided practice of automatically advancing students to the next grade.

True, leaving students behind while their classmates are promoted can make children feel like outcasts and damage their self-esteem. But it does them no good to climb the social promotion ladder and emerge at the end of high school able to read or write with only the greatest difficulty, if at all.

In some cases, summer school may enable students to be promoted and keep up with classmates. In others, even the extra few weeks of instruction will not be enough and a grade will have to be repeated.

To their credit, Orange County school districts have sent several rounds of warning notices to parents that their children might have to repeat a grade unless they improve.

Extra state funds have helped as well, providing money for after-school programs, tutoring and some Saturday classes during the regular school year.

But the dimensions of the problem can be seen in districts like Garden Grove Unified, where 9,000 students, nearly one-fifth of the district’s total enrollment, are in summer school because they are working below grade level and considered at risk of not advancing.

This year Garden Grove began a districtwide program to end social promotion for students in the third, sixth and eighth grades. Parents were told last fall that their children were at risk to be held back and were given a chance to take part in programs to help the students.

That parental involvement is an important part of education. Parents who keep tabs on homework and stay in touch with teachers demonstrate to their children the importance of education. That reinforces what is taught in the classroom.

Also important is the tack taken by the Buena Park School District, where an official notes that when children are held back, it’s not a matter of doing the same thing all over again. Just putting a child in the same seat with the same teacher for a second year of trying to learn the same thing won’t work. Bringing in better teachers is one way to improve a situation. Providing smaller classes and more individual instruction are other worthwhile tactics.

Social promotion was a long-lasting feature of California education. Ending it will not be a quick process. Schools need to take care to provide extra help for children for whom learning is difficult.