 |
T A B L E+T A L K Is Dan Quayle as stupid as everyone makes him out to be? Theorize about the man who would be president in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Scandal's silver lining Stalking Sidney Blumenthal The mysterious death of Tyisha Miller The vanilla story What did the president touch, and when did he touch it? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
 ![[ Mothers Who Think: Queen Noor, peacemaker ]](/news/1999/02/src/11newslinks.gif) |
||
 |
CLINTON'S DUMBEST EDUCATION IDEA | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Although Charles Murray traces the social promotion controversy to the 1960s, its roots go back to the early days of the century, when students began staying in school well past childhood, instead of leaving after a few years for farm or industrial work. As students who might have dropped out began staying in school longer, many lagged behind their better educated or more privileged peers, and the practice of holding back those who weren't achieving began to spread. But as Richard Rosenblatt explained in a recent issue of Phi Delta Kappan magazine, turn-of-the-century educators then began to worry about rising numbers of students repeating grades. In 1908, Rosenblatt found, the Russell Sage Foundation sounded alarms about the growing amount of education money being wasted on students going through the same grade twice. Some researchers found that as many as two-thirds of students in certain school districts had been left back. Education reformers began charting the negative effects of retention and calling for more individualized instruction to allow students to advance with their peers -- in other words, social promotion. By 1938, a National Education Association survey found, most school districts practiced some version of social promotion. The pendulum began to swing back in the 1950s, Rosenblatt observed, as critics blamed social promotion for declining achievement. In reality, many school districts, and individual schools, had always held back large numbers of failing students. In the 1960s and '70s, advocates for poor and minority children did take aim at retention, finding that black children were more likely to be left back, and that retention hurt their later school performance. But the 1980s, which saw the reversal of many liberal social policies at the national, state and local level, brought the large-scale return of retention. While Clinton cites the fledgling Chicago experiment to back his crusade against social promotion, he'd be better off looking at what happened in New York, which abolished social promotion in 1981, but abandoned the program as a failure in 1983. Despite investing more than $50 million in 1,100 new teachers, New York left back more than 25,000 students in those two years. Unfortunately, their achievement didn't improve, says Ernest House, who evaluated the program. And years later, research found that New York students retained during that experiment were more likely to drop out than comparable low-achieving students who weren't left back. African-American boys who were retained were 37 percent more likely to drop out, House notes, and other studies show similar bad results for black males who've been retained in other districts. Black and Latino students are disproportionately left back under the current retention policies. House and others believe Chicago is destined to repeat New York's mistakes. While Chicago school officials claim their program has increased overall student achievement, there has been no independent evaluation, House notes. "It's astonishing that a program that is so controversial and costs so much money has not been independently evaluated after three years," he says. New York, too, proclaimed its 1981 program an early success, based on internal data, but outside evaluators disputed those early gains, leading New York to abandon the experiment. The Consortium on Chicago School Reform recently took issue with the school district's data, finding that recent improvement in student test scores could not be attributed to its retention experiment. And while Chicago boasts that most students referred to its summer programs manage to move on to the next grade level, thanks to the extra help, a full 46 percent do not. Chicago school district officials did not return phone calls seeking comment on their program. Programs to end social promotion don't have to lead to widespread retention. Many schools have adopted a policy of abolishing social promotion, but they put resources into identifying students at risk of repeating a grade early in the school year, and offer tutors and other special help. La Ballona Elementary School in Culver City, Calif., for instance, has done such a good job with its program to identify lagging students that last September, then-Gov. Wilson chose it as the site to sign legislation ending social promotion in California. "Yes, some kids are going to be held back," Wilson acknowledged at the press conference. But not at La Ballona. The Los Angeles Times reported that only two or three students a year are actually retained, despite their ambitious program. The principal called retention "a terrible option." Several cities, including Corpus Christi, Texas, and Long Beach, Calif., have abolished social promotion without vastly increasing retention. Corpus Christi tests at-risk students every three weeks to make sure they're keeping up. Most educators say retention should be one option among many considered for students who can't achieve at grade level. "The 'expert opinion' on retention changes every 10 years," complains Barbara Karvelis, principal of San Francisco's Edison Elementary School. "Each case is individual, and you can't have one policy. You've got to consider the student's age, gender, their parents' views, whether they were absent a lot." The handful of studies that have found positive benefits to retention have mostly been in well-funded, suburban schools, where the small number of students who are retained are more likely to get the special help they need than at urban schools where higher numbers fail. N E X T+P A G E+| What works? |
||