Failing the Grade System
By ARTHUR LEVINE, NY TIMES, September 26, 2004

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg reignited the social promotion debate this month by announcing that fifth graders who do poorly on standardized tests will not be promoted to the sixth grade.

The reactions were predictable; in fact, they were the same that greeted the mayor's decision in January to no longer promote third graders who did not meet state standards. After all, liberals, as a rule, embrace social promotion, and conservatives, as a rule, oppose it.

And political maneuvering plays a big role in the debate. In January, for instance, the teachers' union, which was being pushed hard by the mayor to make concessions, seized upon the issue as a way to criticize the administration, as did potential challengers to Mr. Bloomberg in next year's mayoral election. There were City Council hearings and a tumultuous meeting of the Department of Education advisory board, while the news media focused on the horse-race angle.

Somehow in all of this, the educational merits and demerits of social promotion got lost. That's too bad, because research on the subject is clear: neither social promotion nor holding back students works. Leaving students back increases their dropout rate, while using the same methods to teach them the subjects they failed to master the first time does not help them progress. Socially promoted students, meanwhile, are unable to learn more advanced material in the next grade and are more likely to become disruptive, diminishing their classmates' ability to learn as well.

There are three steps the school system could take that might quell this fruitless debate and help our children. First, starting from the first days in a classroom, schools could assess all students' skills - moving ahead students who are beyond their grade level and providing additional instruction to students who are behind. Second, the system could create transitional classes between grades. Thus, the student who would ordinarily be left back in third grade, say, would move into an intermediary third-fourth grade in which the focus would be on remediation in areas of weakness and building on subjects already mastered, instead of repeating the entire grade. Third, the school system could extend the school day or academic year for all students, allowing advanced students to take enrichment classes and lagging students to do additional work in areas in which they learn more slowly.

These are simple remedial steps. But they skirt the real problem: schooling is time-based. Schools should not group students by age and grade, advancing them individually based on their achievements in specific areas.

Imagine if you brought your laundry to the cleaners, and the proprietor asked you how long you wanted your clothes washed. The answer, of course, is that you want your clothes washed until they are clean.

Yet we educate all students for the same amount of time. They are all expected to learn the same material in 180 days even though they come to school with different levels of ability and experience. Inevitably, some students can't keep up, forcing schools to decide whether to promote them or leave them back.

This problem would disappear if the education system simply recognized that children learn at different rates. This would require us to fix as constant the goals we have for students and vary the amount of time they are given to attain them. Instead of saying all students should graduate in 12 school years of 180 days each, it is more realistic to acknowledge that some can achieve the stated goals in less time and others will take longer.

We follow this practice in so many other aspects of our lives. When we teach our children to drive, we don't demand that they all learn to do it in the same amount of time. Rather, we grant them a license when they have mastered driving, no matter how long or short that takes.

Interestingly, one New York City program has given this flexibility to gifted students. Special Progress classes allow the most able students to go through middle school in two years rather than three, reducing the amount of time needed to complete schooling from 12 to 11 years. But there is no similar provision for students who need more than 12 years. In essence, we are saying it is reasonable to complete the curriculum in less time, but unacceptable to need more time.

Our expectation should be that schooling will be completed in 10 to 14 years. If we did this, the issue of social promotion would become meaningless. And more important, students would obtain a better education.


Arthur Levine is the president of Teachers College at Columbia