[george76]

How utterly amusing that a concept as old as the hills is praised as revolutionary when put forth by the education establishment. Too bad it's not funny to the students who are denied a decent education by that same establishment who cares more for their own cushy jobs than for those they are charged to serve.

It causes one to question more and more just what percentage of Colorado teachers could pass the CSAP at the grade level they teach. I'd bet dollars to donuts to all takers that it would be below 50%.

ht comments

[george76]

wonder why most Public Schools are a failure ?

[Sopater]

The “social promotion” idea is carried over into the work place where workers complain about their job and how they are treated all day... complain about management and that nothing gets done... and then they complain when someone who hasn’t been there as long as they have get’s promoted ahead of them... someone who doesn’t spend the day complaining, but accomplishing.

[Sopater]

On the flip side of social promotion, my parents and the schools seriously considered holding me back a year because I was younger and smaller than everyone else in my grade. I started Kindergarten at age 4 (birthday in October) and was small for my age. Always pulling straight “A”s wasn’t enough to convince the wise acedemics who thought I belonged with children my own age and size.

What a bunch of dolts.

[PowderMonkey]

This won't last long. It's been tried elsewhere. The program's innovators get awards and accolades, and move on. Then, DPS bureaucrats will come down the hall in the next year or two, screaming about how more new kids are coming in every year, so it costs the system too much money to flunk the dim ones and make them repeat a year. They'll go back to doing what most systems do: rubber stamp them through until they're old enough to drop out. Nothing works better than having a mommy and daddy that place a high value on education; get involved; take away the video games, and sit on you until your homework is done. Everything else is just fluff.

[chainsaw]

Their students may be the only educated public school grads in the country.

Keep up the good work Kristin Waters!

[luckystarmom]

My only thing with all of this is that the public schools tend to ignore children with learning disabilities until it is too late.

My daughter is like this. She does not qualify for any special needs services (even though she has a brain injury). The public school would not provide services until she fell below the 7th percentile. That’s very low (and she used to qualify for speech with that percentile).

In 3rd grade, we had an independent evaluation that showed my daughter had all sorts of memory, auditory, and speech problems, but the school district only wanted to make accomodations for her and they didn’t want to provide any remediation.

We pulled her out of public school and put her in a private school with pull out for a multi-sensory reading program. My daughters reading and spelling went up using this program. We also provided 2 hours of private therapy, and my daughters speech increased a lot by going to private therapy.

Even with these extra services, my daughter is still only at grade level for reading. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been without the services. She would have kept falling behind, and we would have never been able to get her from falling behind.

Now, we just have to keep her hanging on to grade level work.