Catania’s reforms, part 2: Ending “social promotion”

Last week, Councilmember David Catania announced 7 proposals to restructure operations at DC Public Schools (DCPS). Yesterday we looked at a bill that would give some schools extra money, and school principals control over their budgets. Another bill would discourage the practice of “social promotion.”

In social promotion, a school advances a child to a new grade before he or she has mastered the previous year’s material. This seems ludicrous on its face—why would anyone advance a child who isn’t ready?

The answer is that schools have two options when dealing with a child who has not learned the needed material by the end of the year. The student can either:

• stay in that class for another year (“grade retention”)
• be moved up a year (“social promotion”)

The concept behind grade retention is that this extra time will allow lagging students to catch up. Meanwhile, social promotion programs presume that the child will give up if he or she is so publicly humiliated, and might instead be able to catch up using extra tutoring during the summer or the following school year.

Under either approach, the child who has failed once will be mixed in with children who on average are able to move faster through the curriculum. Without classes aimed at different skill levels or “tracking,” there’s no option to shift them to a slower curriculum that can take more time teaching each concept.

New law shifts from social promotion to grade retention

Title II of Catania’s Focused Student Achievement Act of 2013 sets standards kids must meet to advance from one grade to the next. DCPS had a previous practice requiring social promotion in grades K-2, 4, and 6-7; this bill would end that policy.

The bill does allow principals to choose to promote children they feel need an exception, but only if they are willing to explain their decision in writing to the Chancellor’s office. This preserves flexibility on the part of the principal, but works to stem the tide of children being pushed forward before they’re ready.

It also requires schools to identify students at risk of failure by January, and develop and implement a plan to help them catch up. Two months before the end of the school year (roughly mid-April) the principal must contact parents of students still on course to fail, and give them a list of options that they can pursue to address the problem. This is significant.

The old rules meant that a huge population of students stalled in 9th grade and were unable to advance to 10th as high school grade promotion is based on relatively objective criteria. Of course, large numbers of students dropped out after being trapped in 9th grade year after year. Many of those who did not would spent four or five years in 9th grade and then graduate due to odd loopholes in the graduation requirements.

Note that these students would never be in 10th grade, never take DC CAS, and thus never be a part of school evaluations. There is some evidence this is an intentional result, and this anomaly will be the subject of its own article, at a later date.

So, Catania’s bill realigns DC’s grade advancement policy from promotion to “grade retention”, or generally keeping kids in a grade until they complete its requirements. Is this a good idea?

Arguments for retention

The rationale to keep children in a grade if they haven’t completed its requirements is simple: if they’ve not learnt the previous year’s material, they will be very unlikely to succeed in the subsequent grade. Socially promoted children are far more likely to be truant than average students, and far more likely to eventually drop out of school altogether. Of course, it’s unlikely they would be average students, regardless of whether they were promoted or retained.

Florida ended social promotion statewide in 2002, and a study that examined the effect of the change seemed optimistic. The authors noticed a rise in test scores among students who were retained when compared to similarly struggling students who were advanced to the next grade.

Another study found that increased retention in elementary school was associated with a small rise in the eventual average male hourly wage. This suggests that retention may have positive outcomes which have a beneficial impact on these students’ careers and may not be identifiable through standardized testing.

Arguments for promotion

While the arguments for retention seem convincing, there are reasons this debate wasn’t settled long ago. New York City shifted from a promotion-oriented system to one similar to Catania’s proposal in 1981. When researchers examined the effects of that policy years later, they found that students had been truant, and dropped out, at far higher rates under the retention-oriented program than similar students had under the earlier promotion-oriented approach.

While the narrative of social promotion has been that teachers and principals don’t want to hold students back for fear of “hurting their feelings,” in fact the feelings of humiliation and disillusionment may be responsible for this significant drop in school graduation rates that New York City experienced. Other studies have suggested that retained students have higher rates of alcohol abuse, and teen pregnancy, than their promoted peers.

Neither is a good solution; DC needs targeted intervention

It’s significant that both options make their case primarily by describing the flaws in the other. Retention proponents argue promotion hurts test scores, while promotion advocates point to the higher drop-out rates and social dysfunction retention provokes. For over 10 years, government and nonprofit education policy analysts have been arguing for a third option.

Under this alternative, school officials detect possible failure early. Teachers and counselors intervene with the student before he or she fall too far behind. This is, of course, an optimistic scenario, but research has generally concluded that it is simply the only way to see any actually positive change in the status quo.

These interventions require extra in-school time, extra teaching resources, and an administration infrastructure that notices the problem early enough that these measures have a chance to suceed.

It takes a lot of work to see this through, but Catania’s bill contains some elements that can effect this sort of early-intervention policy. It makes clear that schools have an obligation to monitor their students and help them to pass using individualized assistance.

For that reason, more than any other, it appears to be a positive step for DCPS, though it’s important for legislators and school officials to keep focusing less on the question of social promotion versus retention, and more on ways to help students before either becomes necessary.