Tag: public education

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Pass or Fail: Is the Academic Cost Worth It?

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Do the ends justify the means in terms of social promotion and retention practices? How do these policies impact the academic career of a child who is retained or promoted without having achieved the required grade level knowledge and skill?

The most obvious cost for socially promoted or retained students are inevitably academic in nature. While data on the effects upon students’ long-term academic performance are not conclusive (primarily because they are not consistent) there’s enough evidence to suggest that most socially promoted students find that their long-term academic potential is significantly undermined. For retained students, the results are the same, yet the explanation is different.

Let’s Look at Retention First…

Many retention policies require that students repeat a grade, occasionally even multiple times, until they meet certain academic standards. Though there’s no such thing as a universal retention policy, procedures are usually put into effect based on a student’s inability to achieve acceptable grades, or adequate scores on standardized exams. Whereas children with diagnosed special needs have an IEP developed to provide elements of specialized instruction, retained students often do not receive any specific support. Certainly, it is very rare for them to receive support that derives from data that pertains to their particular educational goals and provides insight into areas of learning deficit.

Numerous studies have demonstrated the negative effects of student retention on academic performance. The focus of these studies is wide ranging, from generalizations about why retention and promotion policies do not work, to specific studies and reviews of why these policies do not work for certain groups of students. Some studies have considered achievement results in kindergarten and the impact of retention. Still others have tracked the test results of retained students beyond the year of their retention or have examined literacy results specifically, recognizing reading levels as fundamental to education.

Regarding academic costs, education authorities rarely report substantial academic gains for retained students. The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) offered a position statement on retention that indicated the failure of retained students to do better than their promoted peers. Studies on the academic development of retained versus promoted students, found that negative effects specific to academic achievements were widespread. In other words, the academic cost of retention versus social promotion, is that students do not benefit from the policy of testing, with the intention of retaining or promoting based on the results.

Neither social promotion nor retention specifically helps enhance an individual’s academic standing or potential, and students in many cases are less successful academically after retention or social promotion. At best, any positive results (and there is a minimal amount reported) tend to be short-lived and outweighed by the negative effects of retention versus social promotion.

Retained students can also experience a negative bias or the disadvantage of preconceived notions among other teachers they encounter. As one researcher theorized, when a student is retained, it impacts the beliefs of teachers the student will encounter in his future educational career. Another researcher, suggests that neither social promotion nor retention is effective in solving the problem of providing appropriate instruction for low-performing students.

The retention of some students can lead to short-term achievement gains, immediately following retention. Retained adolescent students demonstrated increased academic achievement the year after they were retained, but these improvements proved to be short-lived. This suggests that retention can create false hopes for students after retention. A noted decline of positive effects in subsequent years, occasionally resulting in a second retention was common. The most striking academic cost, according to findings, is the erosion of enthusiasm for learning among retained students.

The truth is that the failure of our public education system to support students who do not achieve the graded standards by year’s end determines that a substantial population of public school students and future workers are essentially unprepared or underprepared for successful participation in the labor force. Of the 4 million high school dropouts in 1986, one in six were unemployed and many were not in the labor force at all because of the overwhelming competition from high school and college graduates. The correlation between retention and social promotion and high school dropout rates is something to keep in mind.

In essence, the failure to inspire individual students succeed in school means they are less productive overall for the remainder of their life. Less likely to pursue higher education opportunities, they are also more likely to be unemployed and will earn considerably less during their lifetime. Our education system is failing itself by producing individuals who are unable to contribute and thrive within society.

Again, do the costs of social promotion and retention really outnumber the benefits? Are the brief advantages worth the potential for long-term, life-altering academic failure?

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Pass or Fail: Eliminating ‘Teacher-Pleasing’ Practices

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

How much of what a teacher does in a day is with the student in mind – and how much of it is to fit his or her own teaching agenda?

In The Exceptional Teacher, a study on transforming traditional teaching through thoughtful practice, Elizabeth Aaronsohn discusses some “traditional” teaching models and approaches to teaching: “I define traditional teaching as teaching in which the focus is on the content, about which the teacher is understood to be an expert, and which must be ‘covered’ in such a way as to ensure that students acquire a certain body of knowledge based on the activity of watching and listening to the teacher.”

Aaronsohn goes on to define what she considers the problems of this teaching mode, the habits that are teacher-pleasing, beginning with an analysis of teacher-pleasing as a theoretical framework. The contention is clearly that teachers are not encouraging students to learn for themselves, to think, or to analyze the material. Rather, the focus of teacher-pleasing is memorization and rote learning designed to secure good grades.

“Children in school learn well, and very early, that grades are the teachers’ ultimate power over them,” Aaronsohn contends, adding that this tends to make students do what they need to do to get a good grade. They cookie-cut their learning to fit within the parameters of what their teachers want rather than what would be beneficial to them in the long run.

Aaronsohn also argues that traditional teachers seem primarily concerned with having students memorize the right answers, demonstrate proper grammar, and focus on correct form rather than devote time to the development of original ideas, either in classroom discussion or student writing. This is where traditional teaching fails the student because this approach simply encourages children to do what they need (and often only what they need) to survive in school.

Too often the unspoken goal of traditional teaching is simply to escape retention or social promotion by keeping grades above failing. The management of classroom learning to provide different modes of teaching for different types of students should be a major area of research.

One of the shortcut learning tricks displayed by many students being taught under traditional methods is the practices such as not reading an entire assigned text, but simply listening carefully to the teacher’s comments because of the certainty that only they would be tested. Another trick is “playing the system,” which entails skipping the reading entirely and allowing teachers to “spoon-feed” the content they intend to test.

All of these are shortcuts that students have evolved from learning the game the traditional K-12 system – and what teachers need to push back against. Understanding how to engage students beyond what the teacher may have written in a lesson plan is tricky but important to reaching this current generation of students.

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Pass or Fail: Teacher Training Impacts Student Success

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

What’s the true value of teachers? What are they worth to the education system and what we should be doing to make the most of their skills and time?

The relationship between teacher expertise and student success is vital to the success of this generation of students, and the next.

So, how do we go about creating qualified and competent teachers?

Teachers are usually the stakeholders we hold accountable for transferring standards, knowledge, and skills to our students. And whether or not this accountability is fair, if teachers themselves are not adept at the transfer of knowledge and skills then it hardly matters what sort of standards or curriculum an education system has developed.

We assume that teachers play a role in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of individual students. Part of being an effective teacher is having some insight into students – when they are excelling or likely to excel, when they are likely to need help, what sort of help they are going to need, and how they can make the most out of their natural abilities.

In our discussion of retention and social promotion so far, we noted that teachers play a part in deciding whether to retain struggling students or promote them. Teacher assessment is another of the core elements in this decision. Not only do teachers decide how to support students needing help, provide the support, and assess the student in their progress; teacher assessments also tend to make up a big part of the overall assessment process when it comes to retention decisions.

A lot depends on teacher quality. If teachers are not appropriately qualified and trained to meet these expectations and handle this responsibility, what is the price we end up paying? What is the consequence of this structuring?

The simple reality is this: not all teachers entering the classroom, whether at the elementary or secondary level, have adequate training and experience to meet raised expectations for student learning. Although effective teachers are the best defense against retention and social promotion, because they can make up for much of what individual students might lack in natural ability or capacity for knowledge or skills development, we have to be clear about what teachers need to do in the classroom. We have to establish all of our expectations, not just the ones that have the weight of officialdom.

A strong teacher, at the end of the day, is an invaluable classroom tool, although the education system has yet to define what constitutes a strong teacher. Certainly, we have yet to figure out exactly how to produce strong teachers with any degree of consistency.

The challenge is to think about the qualification standards for teachers – what should they be able to demonstrate regarding academic training, professional training, and professional experience? We also have to consider what it is that constitutes teacher competency – what practices should a teacher be able to implement in a classroom setting? What models for teaching should they be able to use? Considering these and related questions about quality teaching, we can then begin to identify the nature and causes of problems that are undermining teacher quality.

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Pass or Fail: Communicating Standards Effectively

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

It’s not enough to establish consistent standards for students – educators must also communicate those expectations effectively. How can a child meet standards if he or she does not even know what is expected?

Communication is deeply tied to consistency.

Research suggests that a confluence of factors determines the achievement trajectory and the decision to remain in school or drop out for an individual student. Dropping out is influenced by the individual student’s developmental history, including early family experiences, elements of the home environment, and the student’s personality. Other factors include the quality of teaching supports and the circumstances of the individual student at any given point in his education.

Collins and Sroufe, Sameroff, and Sameroff and Chandler all offered transactional models to explain the positive correlation of retention and high school dropout rate. These models depend on the contract between the individual and his educators and are based on the assumption that each interaction affects subsequent interactions.

The core of the developmental transactional model holds that behaviors are always a product of developmental history and current circumstance. As Jimerson et al. explain, in the transactional model, “early developmental history is given some priority, not because it ineluctably causes later outcomes, but because what the child takes forward from these experiences in part frames subsequent transactions with the environment.” Bronfenbrenner draws a similar conclusion – that the effects of educational experiences on children are further determined by the transactional nature of their experiences within the classroom, their early developmental history, and their contemporaneous experiences outside a formal educational setting.

The principle point is that a variety of factors influence a student’s education. There are many stakeholders and influences when it comes to academic success. Later outcomes tend to be a reflection of earlier factors and, concerning grade retention specifically, the experience of being retained can also be one of the factors leading to dropout. As we have seen, retention can lead to self-esteem problems, poor socio-emotional adjustment, isolation from peers, and emotional disengagement from school.

It is, therefore, critical that educators identify the experiences a student has had or may be having that have the potential to affect his education in the future. Teachers, administrators, and educational support staff – anyone in the school setting with an investment in the individual student – should make an effort to engage with the student to determine the factors that are influencing his current performance level. Furthermore, a substantial effort should be made to communicate with the student and his or her parents to identify those extracurricular experiences that are probably impacting academic performance.

All communication should lead to the clear definition of academic standards and expectations, and to how they might be achieved on a practical level.

As anyone with experience in the field knows, it is important to be particularly sensitive to socioeconomic conditions when communicating with students and their families. However, in schools forced to struggle with high rates of student failure and grade retention, the political and economic pressures to reduce subsequent dropout has made communication difficult. In other words, most education professionals don’t manage the communication side very well.

 

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Pass or Fail: The Importance of Academic Consistency

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Benchmarks are necessary to judge student progress – but are we failing kids with our current way of measuring success?

An important way to eradicate the pass or fail system is through the creation of clear standards to gauge academic achievement. The need for such a focus is highlighted by one of the best-known contemporary criteria for judging student progress, the Common Core. The Common Core and similar standards suffer from an acute lack of clarity. The need for clear standards is critical.

Clear standards provide the advantage of an external check on the teaching and learning process as well as a guide for educators attempting to define expectations for success. They give educators a reliable foundation for making decisions about student progress.

The most important characteristic of effective standards and goals is consistency. If for example, a school establishes an achievement requirement for grade advancement, that standard must be applied consistently. If such a standard is to apply to the district or the public education system as a whole, it must be applied in the same way everywhere.
There are several problems involved in applying standards in an educational context. One is that all students are different, and a format that might work for one student could spell disaster for another. Another problem is that quantitative measurements of intelligence and understanding are difficult to employ. Measuring the quality of written expression, for instance, inevitably entails a measure of subjectivity.

And if quantitative, more objective assessments are applied, such as the number of specific types of a clause in a piece of writing, the question arises of whether a student’s performance necessarily reflects his writing ability. These and similar problems warrant some consideration in the context of the development of educational standards. What is the best policy, for instance, when it comes to the assessment of skill that is relatively subjective, such as clarity of expression, or creativity, in writing?

Even oral communication skills cannot be assessed in a completely objective manner. There are certain qualities in a presentation that are irreducibly individualistic. Can we assess the persuasiveness of a speech, for instance, or its appropriateness for a specific audience, with standards that are completely objective?

The solution to the problem of subjectivity usually entails development of precise guidelines designed to identify the things that teachers should be looking for. Appropriate training for teachers in interpreting and applying such guidelines is also necessary if educational goals and standards are to be applied and assessed with maximum consistency.

In Fair Isn’t Always Equal, Wormeli discusses the importance of assigning grades that clearly and consistently reflect the quality of the student’s performance. As Wormeli points out, a student who performs inconsistently might receive a grade that is unfairly skewed if the grade consists of an arithmetic average. Skewing can occur because of just one or two outlier performances.

Another grading alternative involves attainment of a threshold or minimum grade. Assessment procedures based on minimum grades are, however, rarely based on empirical research. What literature there is tends to cite the works of Thomas Guskey, and Guskey states that he knows of no studies that explore the effectiveness of minimum grading as a policy.

Indeed, he goes so far as to state that the application of minimum grading is probably ineffective. Proponents of appropriate minimum thresholds usually make use of hypothetical situations rather than actual data. Guskey suggested fifty percent as an appropriate threshold. Wormeli, however, makes a convincing case for sixty percent, while the popular press reports schools that use thresholds as high as seventy percent.

What, then, should we aim for regarding standards and goals, and how should we use them?

First, schools and school districts must work to create consistent standards and ensure that teachers understand them. Consistency, however, is not limited to teachers’ interpretation of standards. Many alternative strategies to retention and social promotion involve early identification of and targeted academic assistance for low-achieving students, as well as individualized instruction, parental involvement, curriculum development, school restructuring, summer school options, and personalized tutoring programs.

To effectively manage standards in education, we also need consistency in the application of strategies for academic support. We need clear standards not only for what is expected of a student, but what students should expect of themselves, what parents can do to support their children, and when and how various strategies or interventions might be used.

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Pass or Fail: Revising Academic Standards and Accountability

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Are teacher accountability standards completely out of control? More specifically, does teacher accountability fuel the social promotion and retention motivation?

The notion of accountability has historically applied primarily to school boards and school governance systems. By 1927, the complexity of accountability had grown to the point that Yale Professor George S. Counts wrote in 1927 that the role of school boards, the principle accountability body, had “the basic purpose of education and the relation of the school to the social order.”

The problem, though, was the severe undermining of the goal-setting aspect. The more favored economic and social classes, including small-business owners, professionals, and business executives, tended to make up about 76 percent of urban school board members. In other words, the appointment of school board members was based upon social status, having little to do with actual investment and qualification for the position.

Comparing the American system to international models, Rothstein emphasizes that other nations use inspections for school accountability and manage to overcome the most serious impediments experienced in the United States. In particular, Rothstein emphasizes that the English system employs professional inspectors rather than volunteers and that their inspection system subsequently undergoes revisions on a fairly regular basis.

The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory also discusses five strategies to help students succeed that are worth considering. Emphasizing the high-stakes testing and accountability movement as key in the promotion of retention and social promotion policies, the report outlines the intensification of learning, the provision of professional development to ensure skilled teachers, expanded learning options, access to informed teachers, and early and frequent interventions to support students, including ongoing diagnostic assessments to help schools develop intervention strategies for failure and accelerated learning.

Citing the hallmarks of successful intervention, the report establishes that early intervention offered regularly and frequently—and tied to the work students are doing as a part of their normal school routine—provides the best support for students. The material used in the early intervention should supplement classroom instruction, be paced to accelerate learning, and be offered in a multifaceted form.

So how can accountability standards be changed to positively impact students?

Click here to read all my suggestions for alternatives to social promotion and retention.

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Pass or Fail: Effective Education Policies to Respond to Social Promotion and Retention

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Are the very policies put in place to “help” students actually hurting them?

If a student experiences retention or social promotion, the policies themselves do not help to reverse poor academic performance. Retention prevents a student from having to take on more of an educational challenge. In that respect, it is reactionary. It does nothing to address the student’s initial failings at his or her current grade level. The same is true of social promotion.

An effective alternative strategy must be able to provide comprehensive support for academic, social, emotional, and psychological needs of students, along with clear and measurable goals and objectives for students, teachers, administrators, and parents.

In a brief on the issues raised by the No Child Left Behind Act, Garcia considers the factors that might if effectively implemented, have assisted with the success of states’ educational reforms. He looks closely at addressing the need for a coherent testing program and managing trade-offs between the high expectations of students and the high numbers of low-performing schools.

Garcia outlined the need to lead educational policy with standards rather than tests, and to have a system in place to ensure the quality of all tests, particularly with respect to alignment with state standards. He also outlined the need to establish an anchor for proficiency at the end of high school that would help students to be prepared for college and high-growth careers. He considered the creation of college-ready and high-growth career-ready students to be the point at which school policies should aim, with standards and expectations mapped backward to set expectations for earlier grades.

Targeting responses was another strategy that Garcia thought would be helpful to low-performing schools. He also recommended establishing categories for poor performance and distinguishing the most academically needy schools, targeting the most substantial assistance or interventions to those schools with the lowest performance rates.

Sustaining public support amid expanded testing and accountability will inevitably help to make schools more successful. Making state testing and accountability systems as transparent as possible and fostering a third-party organization to mount a sustained public engagement campaign, as Garcia suggests, would prove useful in addressing some of the main challenges to the application of effective academic standards and the supporting of all students to achieve exceptional academic results.

There are, however, at least two distinct types of strategies when it comes to educational reform. First are the strategies designed to bring about improvement by improving the education and standards in a broad way. Most of the strategies outlined by Garcia fall into this first category, and they apply to a range of aspects of the education system.

The second category targets the grading system. The grading system, after all, is the basis for retention and social promotion. Alternatives include a system allowing for varied academic assessments, or one offering a different system for academic progression, one that does not rely on graded knowledge and skills testing like our current system.

Click here to read all my suggestions for alternatives to social promotion and retention.

 

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Pass or Fail: Why High-Stakes Tests for Retention Decisions Fails

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

As an education community, do we put too much stock in standardized testing? In other words – are we unfairly retaining students based on a testing system that is flawed?

High-stakes tests in retention decisions have added another layer of controversy to the debate over retention. Test-based retention is itself an educationally beneficial placement, which we have coupled with the issue of whether chosen tests validate inferences concerning student knowledge and educationally beneficial placements. As we said above, most of the time, the inferences are not valid at all.

In the wealth of academic research on this particular subject, we find Penfield discussing the extent to which research has confirmed test-based grade retention as a particularly problematic approach to education. Teachers initiate the majority of retention decisions, but an increasing number of states and districts have taken to using high-stakes tests to make retention decisions.

To be specific, Texas, Florida, and Louisiana are among the states that retain children in gateway grades primarily based on standardized test performance. Several large school districts, including New York and Chicago, also employ standardized tests as key criteria for grade retention decisions.

Common Core Standards are heavily reliant on assessments to achieve their aims. As most educators and parents are already aware, the principle objective of the Common Core Standards is to provide “a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.”

The Common Core Standards seek to make every child learn at the same pace, with teachers and parents roped into the process of standardizing the learning experience. Kindergarteners must learn one set of things to advance to first grade. First graders must learn another set of things, and so on, all the way through the system.

Because they are intended to be nationwide, Common Cores lead to assessments that are as standardized as possible. Students must submit to testing with even more regularity than they have in the past, and must demonstrate, in these test scenarios, that they have acquired all of the standards for knowledge and skill that the Core demanded of them.

Numerous factors appear to influence the validity of assessments, including the opportunities that students have had to learn the content of the test, whether the test measures the intended constructs, whether the test leads to the intended educational goals, whether the scores are reflective of high-quality instructions, and whether the test has afforded students sufficient opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and achievements.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) make up much of the standards for fair and appropriate tests. These standards also play a central role in determining the appropriate use of tests, but the reality falls far short of their supposed ideal parameters.

The use of tests in making retention decisions is complicated by the disproportional impact that test-based retention policies have on historically disadvantaged groups, including ethnic minority groups, racial minority groups, and English language learners. Numerous studies indicate that large achievement gaps exist between the majority and protected student populations.

These gaps point to the possibility that students of protected populations are in jeopardy for displaying disproportionately low passing rates on tests used to make retention decisions. Recent reports have pointed to disproportionately high retention rates for students in Florida and Texas, which have high proportions of minorities among their students. Penfield also questions the validity of test scores obtained from high-stakes tests, which don’t appear supported for all protected populations.

Penfield’s research alone seems grounds to take a long, hard look at assessments and how we use them when it comes to promoting or retaining students. If there is a big gap between the types of groups of students who pass assessments and fail them, then it seems fair to assess the assessments themselves.

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Pass or Fail: What Are the Alternatives to Retention and Social Promotion?

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

It’s clear that the social promotion and retention strategies and the pass-or-fail focus of our current school system, have high price tags and return very little on investment. The long-term problems are very real and very costly. Although there are inevitable differences of opinion, most educators agree that the high costs associated with retention and social promotion policies warrant a very careful review.

The ineffectiveness of these strategies indicates that we need to develop an entirely new way of helping students with academic problems. Indeed, the fact that these actions are so frequently counterproductive to the individual student is a warning signal that they need much more than a mere review. Retention and social promotion are symptoms of a serious societal dysfunction that can only be cured by the development of a new, qualitatively different education system. The starting point for this new system must be the individual girl or boy and their ability to develop intellectually and psychologically in a variety of learning contexts.

But what type of alternative system are we proposing?

Because of the chaos and dysfunction that is prevalent in the current system, we must first be clear on what we’re not aiming for regarding systemic improvements.

Many alternative strategies can reduce the incidence of retention and social promotion. There are plenty of these kinds of alternatives, and some of them go so far as to focus on preventing the failure cycle that sustains poor performance. Other proposals try to transform social promotion and retention into an effective intervention process. Unfortunately, none of these proposals stands out as a clear winner.

Because some alternatives to retention and social promotion are already available, one must ask oneself why so few of them are used. Why is it that we are forcing Common Core standards on our children in spite of overwhelming evidence that such standardized learning and over-testing is ineffective?

Numerous studies have explored alternative strategies to retention and social promotion. One such study, by McDonald and Bean, offers 25 alternatives to retention. In the course of their study, McDonald and Bean note that “retention has often been reviewed as a necessity in most school systems by faculty and administration,” but suggest that this is a misguided view.

Their key observation is that the research does not support retention or social promotion as the only options for students falling behind academically. Moreover, they contend that retention is decidedly unhelpful and largely unsuccessful as a strategy for academic recovery. In the end, they conclude it is little more than a “prevailing evil in public schools.”

So what are some of these actual alternatives? Click here to see the full list of alternatives I have suggested to social promotion and retention.

 

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Pass or Fail: Test-Based Retention Practices and Education Standards

pass or fail

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Is testing an accurate portrayal of what students actually know and does it help them progress from one level of mastery to the next?

Today, retention occurs primarily or exclusively based on test results, often without due consideration of the fairness or appropriateness of the test itself.

Some researchers have argued that test-based retention may have a net benefit to society. Contradictory as it might seem, given what we have just discussed, proposed reasons for the benefit include the following: test-based retention can (a) create a more homogeneous class environment that can facilitate instruction, (b) provide motivation for all students to obtain the requisite knowledge, and (c) provide motivation for all teachers and school officials to deliver adequate learning opportunities for all students. These approaches are themselves potential benefits.

According to the theories of classical utilitarianism, the aggregated benefit across all individuals is also significant and outweighs the costs because the majority of students can thrive based on their test scores and regarding promotion or retention.

As Levin has identified, supported by Xia and Glennie, the costs of test-based retention are numerous. They include loss of income and lost tax revenues; increased reliance on government- subsidized health coverage by those that are impacted by these policies, increased criminal activity, higher reliance on welfare benefits, and added instructional resources required for each additional year of schooling generated by the retention.

From a purely economic perspective, the costs associated with test-based retention rival the resulting benefits of these policies to promoted students. Although there has yet to be a formal weighing of costs and benefits of retention policies, the overall net economic benefits of test-based retention policies appear to be negligible.

The economic costs generate an educational disadvantage large enough to have a dramatic adverse impact on the life chances of the retained students. We must also factor in ethical issues: testing heavily infringes on the life chances of low-performing students, constituting a significant violation of fairness.

Even if a net economic benefit resulted from a test-based retention policy for society as a whole, the acceptance of these benefits demands the educational disenfranchisement of so many minority and poor students as to be unconscionable.

Test-based retention is also problematic from a purely assessment-based perspective, regarding how it assesses and how these assessments measure up to basic parameters of fairness. Most forms of test-based retention, considered against criteria for fair and valid testing, fall short. The first problem is measurement validity.

Regarding measurement validity, test-based retention leads to an evaluation of each specific test used in retention decisions. No one can assess validity in a general way because scores are not rigorously applied when retention decisions are made. A school may retain a child who achieves a score within a certain range, based on the determination of relevant education professionals. A different group of education professionals could promote another child who has the same score or even a lower score. There’s little evidence of consistency in scoring.

The effectiveness of treatment is perhaps the policy most prone to consistent violation by test-based retention. Since grade retention is an educational placement, the standards for testing should result in educational placements should that are educationally beneficial to the student. Indeed, if retention is to be a test-based decision, educators should evaluate grade retention per se to determine whether it is ever educationally beneficial.

Of course, retention does have a certain intuitive appeal, which we should not entirely discount. Students who have not adequately mastered certain material should be offered a second attempt to master it. They should undertake that attempt before they graduate to the next grade, where there are new demands to contend with and where the material becomes more difficult.

There are limitations to this rationale, though. Among other things, it clearly ignores the mediating issues. Grade retention inevitably reestablishes students in the same learning environment in which, on their first attempt at knowledge and skills mastery, they have had little success. Retention becomes not only pointless but often takes on the character of punishment.

The embarrassing stigma associated with grade retention is, as we have already shown, intense. There is also the anxiety that most students feel with respect to the retention experience. These negative attributes make retention unlikely to engender any real educational benefits. Students may be worse off regarding academic and cognitive growth than if they had never experienced retention.

Some studies demonstrate that retention puts most students in a worse position than they would be if they had not been retained, meaning that the placement has no educational benefits at all and thus that it is also contrary to standards for test-based placements.

If, collectively as educators, we push back against testing culture as a form of retention measurement, perhaps we can start to find real solutions for students.