A Failure Policy That Succeeds [NYT op-ed by a Chicago teacher who hates social promotion]

NYT OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

A Failure Policy That Succeeds

By MARLENE HEATH

Published: March 30, 2004

CHICAGO — I'll never forget the little girl who sat with a book, ran her fingers across the words, turned the pages and pretended to be reading. She was in one of my first fourth-grade classes at the Beethoven Elementary School on the South Side and we quickly discovered she couldn't recognize the simplest of words, like "in," "it" and "the."

That was in 1990, when we thought holding a child back a grade would hurt his or her self-esteem. So while my pupil was noticeably behind her peers in reading, she and others like her were pushed through each grade anyway, often struggling so much that, hopeless, they dropped out of school at the first chance.

In 1995, Mayor Richard M. Daley began the process of ending this practice, known as social promotion, much to the skepticism of teachers in the Chicago public school system — including me. We decided we'd take a wait-and-see position and let the new policy run its course until we could go back to the old way of doing things. Surprisingly, the results converted even the most obstinate among us.

Now, the decision by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City to end social promotion is being met with the same doubt that many of us in Chicago first expressed almost a decade ago. But as the debate continues, the figures in Chicago speak for themselves:

Only 26 percent of our elementary students were able to meet national norms on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in reading in 1995. That number is now 41 percent. At Beethoven alone, reading comprehension jumped to 46 percent last year from 22 percent in 1997.

About 48 percent of Chicago public school students tested in the lowest quarter nationally before social promotion ended. Now that number is half of what it was. The high school drop-out rate, which was nearly 17 percent in 1995, is now at 13 percent, while the graduation rate has steadily climbed.

But the students who have come through my classrooms over the last 14 years offer the most convincing evidence that retention is one of the best things we can do for a child who needs that extra year to develop literacy skills. I began teaching sixth graders in 1992, and shortly after social promotion ended, I began to see students who were much better prepared. This new caliber of students allowed me to do what I should have been able to do all along — teach sixth-grade-level work to all my students. That hadn't been possible with the two or three nonreaders who had passed each year through my class before.

Today, I'm a reading specialist at Beethoven. And what critics of Chicago's promotion and retention policy fail to realize is that becoming literate is not simply learning how to read. It's also the beginning of learning social studies, science and math. Those of us who know how to read take it for granted and forget how deeply rooted the ability to read is in every discipline.

Last week, the Chicago Board of Education made some changes to its promotion policy, including the creation of an intensive reading program as well as a ban on holding back a student more than twice between kindergarten and the eighth grade. The changes have once again emboldened critics, who say that our public schools are not getting desired results from the policy. They couldn't be more wrong. The new measures will only strengthen our resolve to end social promotion. The road to success is a long one, but we are well on our way.

Nothing is more rewarding than to help a struggling child and watch as the light bulb of learning pops on. Serving the pupils at Beethoven, almost 100 percent living in poverty and many in public housing, is extremely important to me. Beethoven is one of the better-performing public schools on the South Side. And yet I know that if the education system fails to give these children what they need to succeed, there's another, illegal system awaiting them.

My only regret about ending social promotion in Chicago is that it didn't come sooner. I hate to imagine what happened to the little girl who had learned only how to imitate the act of reading. I fear that for every year we allowed her and those like her to move on, we condemned her to fall further behind in school, as well as in life.

I was very surprised to read this editorial, because what I thought I had heard recently was that Chicago was another example of how eliminating social promotion had failed. Well, not according to the reading teacher who wrote this editorial, above.

I think this teacher truthfully speaks for so many teachers when she says this:

....the students who have come through my classrooms over the last 14 years offer the most convincing evidence that retention is one of the best things we can do for a child who needs that extra year to develop literacy skills. I began teaching sixth graders in 1992, and shortly after social promotion ended, I began to see students who were much better prepared. This new caliber of students allowed me to do what I should have been able to do all along — teach sixth-grade-level work to all my [sixth grade] students.....

I bet this Op-Ed, above, will result in some teachers against social promotion writing to the NYT as follows: "Oh, that 'pretend reading' of the child is actually a very positive sign that the student is in the early stages of literacy, and you, as a teacher, need to start wherever that student may be, even if it's there."

Well, yes, but -- I still think a much better goal is to have a classroom of 6th graders actually capable of doing 6th grade work.

It is one thing to be a great failure as a classroom teacher, but it is quite another to be a great classroom teacher stuck in a failed system.

Finally, while this NYT Op-ed author / Chicago teacher mentions NYC's recent struggle to end social promotion, there should also be mention that FL, too, under FL Gov Jeb Bush, has ended social promotion.

Not so fast.....

The Chicago Board of Education voted yesterday(3/24/04) to ease some of the strict pomotion requirements that have served as a model for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's plan to end social promotion in New York City schools.

The action in Chicago came in anticipation of new research expected to show that Chicago's seven-year effort to end social promotion had not raised test scores for third graders and in most cases resulted in lower test scores for sixth graders.

The Chicago board, which is appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, voted 5 to 0 to end the use of math scores as a trigger for holding students back. The board also changed the policy so that no student can repeat the same grade more than once and no student can be held back more than twice between kindergarten and the eighth grade. Chicago's promotion rules, among the toughest in the nation, are enforced in the third, sixth and eighth grades.

One year isn't going to do it if a child is seriously language-delayed or disabled. It's a fiction that someone gets to fourth or fifth grade as an illiterate simply because of "bad teaching."

At best you can hold a child back for a year. It's not a matter of "helping their self esteem." A child that's been retained two or three years is going to be bigger and sexually more mature than most of his cohorts. This turns into a direct threat to the younger children.

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