However, parents and students have to take some responsibility for student learning. I have seen parents who don’t wake their kids up to get them to school on time or just let them stay home – or keep them home to help with younger children and/or jobs. Absent kids aren’t going to learn what they miss well on their own. I’ve seen kids who have extreme circumstances during the school year (family illness and death, usually – sometimes divorce) get promoted because their poor performance was due to circumstances beyond their control, and everyone feels sorry for them.

You have those transient kids who are shuffled from school to school, not really learning anything (and grades are a poor indicator because new kids often get a pass on assignments when they first arrive) get socially promoted because no one’s really sure what their skill set consists of (plus they’re usually gone before the next school year starts). To me, based solely on my own empirical evidence, the largest root cause of social promotion is transiency, at least in the metro area. I realize there are different forces at work in the rural areas where kids don’t move as much.

I agree with your assertion about literacy – if the kids can’t learn to read by 3rd, how are we ever going to expect them to read to learn after that?

Maybe you’ll get to do a couple of ’silver bullet’ workshops for some school system that isn’t meeting AYP though. It’s a lot cheaper to convince everyone that a little more work by teachers would eliminate the need for remediation and special help for struggling students.

Clearly, the practice of social promotion causes many problems. Whether it’s an officially sanctioned process, or one that teachers have merely become accustomed to, social promotion undermines student achievement and teacher morale.

But now let’s look at the situation from where a principal or superintendent might sit. What would happen if we instantly combined high expectations and more rigorous curriculum with accurate grading in low-achieving schools? Over 3-5 year’s time we’d see over-crowded elementary schools and near-empty high schools. Logistically, this is a non-starter. Hence, the culture of social promotion has a practical, albeit pernicious, aspect.

Now, logistical reasons are no excuse for such a heinous practice. But this conundrum does bring to mind a very serious and important issue: we can’t structure out way out of reform. Testing, standards, charters, vouchers, and merit pay are all structural reforms. But school, being the slippery beast that it is, defies restructuring.

Our only hope is to teach our way out.

This is why I find it so fascinating that so few people want to talk about changing teaching. They want to talk about changing tests, changing standards, changing charters, changing unions, changing pay, but they rarely want to talk about the only change that might actually make a difference.

Social promotion is unethical but it arises out of the need for survival. This doesn’t make it OK but it does give us a sense of the magnitude of the problem. It also tells us that social promotion doesn’t exist in isolation. And lets not forget that social promotion exists on a smaller scale in virtually every school in our country – or at least I can say that it has been a part of the “playbook” of each and every one of the 200+ schools I’ve worked with over the last 15 years. How else does one explain the number of high school students who are three, four, or even five years behind?

Smaller and wealthier school districts hide their socially promoted kids by skimming them off into special programs. But in many of our urban schools, the majority of kids fit the description of those who are so far behind that the correlation between their grade level and the number of years they’ve spent in school is meaningless. As such, special programs are also meaningless.

So what’s the answer? Again, it’s teaching. But we can be even more thoughtful than that. If we acknowledge that literacy is the foundation of academic success, and if we acknowledge the brain window for language learning, and if we acknowledge the traditions of elementary school teaching and the natural separation of instructional styles that seems to occur after 3rd grade, we can make simple plans for solid interventions early enough in kids’ lives that strategies like social promotion would be unnecessary.

There are two key places to intervene in a young student’s learning life: at the beginning of 1st grade and at the end of 3rd. It is perfectly reasonable to get kids extra help in the first half of first grade if they are not yet reading and writing independently. And it is perfectly reasonable to retain less successful 3rd graders for an additional year if they have not yet become confident chapter book readers and conventional writers of multi-paragraph essays.

At the same time, we can do several things that make intervention and retention much less likely. First of all, we could concentrate professional development in literacy at the primary grades. Bringing teachers of young children up to speed with the latest and best methods like Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop would improve outcomes tremendously. Second, we can move our most successful teachers to first and third grade. And finally, we can employ the use of high quality early interventions like Reading Recovery for kids who are struggling out of the gate.

The root cause of social promotion is not poor kids, it’s poor teaching. Until we recognize the connection here and actually do something about it, schools with many under-performing children have no logistically sound approach but to pass kids along year after year. This reality does not excuse what is surely a detestable behavior but seeing it for what it is and why it exists should heighten for all of us the importance of making sure our teaching – especially in literacy at the early grades – needs a serious overhaul.

@ seen it all—-If none of these were issues for teachers, it would be much easier to hold them accountable. If I didn’t have any of these problems, it would be easy for me to then pinpoint exactly what I might be doing wrong. I will definitely read the book you suggested, but don’t discredit these issue as not being important. I hold myself accountable and I am VERY reflective about my teaching.