vision2020@moscow.com: social promotion
social promotion
Randall Paulin (paul8321@uidaho.edu)
Tue, 12 Dec 1995 09:40:45 -0800 (PST)
Greetings, visionaries, et al.
By way of background, I should say that I've been subscribed to
the Vision2020 list since its inception, but I've never been sufficiently
inspired to chime in on any particular discussion. As I've been catching
up on my e-mail this morning, I'm intrigued by the deafening silence
that's greeted Bob Probasco's messages regarding the Moscow public
schools. I subscribed to the schools listserv as soon as its creation was
announced, and thus far have seen not a single message on/from it, either.
Hmmm.
Anyway, as a public school teacher of some considerable
experience, and a current doctoral student in education, I sometimes
despair of seeing any meaningful change happen in our public schools.
They are caught in a vortex of conflicting priorities and agendas,and the
fact that they continue to function at all (however well or poorly) is
miraculous to me. But they do, and it is the inertia within them that
both keeps them functioning (after a fashion) and makes them so
phenomenally resistant to change.
The "social promotion" issue is a case in point. Social
promotion begins in the elementary school, and it has its roots in the
desire not to "damage the child's self esteem" by holding him/her back in
grade school. The self-esteem issue aside (and that is an issue for
another entire discussion), promotion vs. retention issues frequently get
ugly, because parents often walk through the principal's door breathing
fire when the issue of retention is raised. I've seen this happen at the
junior high level, and I've seen principals cave in to parental
pressure. Why? Because those principals knew that, when push came to
shove, they were unlikely to get support from their own school boards on
the issue of retaining little Johnny. I don't mean to imply that the
problem is all the fault of our school boards, but the fact remains that
it is an unusual administrator who will boldly take a stand on an issue
he thinks his board won't back him on. (BTW, the use of the male pronoun
is deliberate and accurate; female administrators, at least in Idaho,
remain the exception.)
Social promotion thus is the result of intra-institutional
politics. The kids suffer, because they are being rewarded (or at least
not penalized) for failure. And many of those kids being "socially
promoted" are very bright kids. They're bright enough to figure out that
social promotion is a reality, and that they can, by manipulating the
folks and the system, cruise through junior high in party-and-hellraising
mode, and not learn a bloody thing. Sadly, since social promotion is
recognized as at least a viable option in most schools, many teachers
will give unwarranted passing grades to a particularly obnoxious student,
just to ensure that he/she doesn't darken the door of the teacher's
classroom again next year! As with the school board and the
administration, the fault is not entirely the teacher's, but teachers are
as human as anyone else, and if they have a way to avoid dealing with a
really ornery kid in future, many of them will do so.
How do we deal with this problem? To begin with, the community,
the school board, and the individual school staffs are all going to have
to be committed to rejecting social promotion. And such commitment would
come, IMO, only after a considerable effort to educate all involved as to
the scope and consequences of the problem. A school district which had a
school board committed to a "no social promotion" policy, and which
implemented an effective p.r. effort to explain that policy to parents
and patrons, could minimize (if not eliminate) social promotion. That
would be one solution, but I don't see it as likely in most districts,
because few school boards today are willing to take the political and
personal heat that such a policy would generate.
Another solution-- a more "bottom-up" approach-- would entail
producing a teaching corps the members of which understand the drawbacks
of social promotion, and who are therefore committed to refraining from
the practice. This is an incremental, long-range solution, but I think
it's actually ultimately more feasible. That is to say, when one
considers that social promotion is only one of literally dozens (if not
hundreds) of such individual problematic issues in the schools today, one
begins to realize that dealing with these problems primarily requires
classroom teachers who are aware of the problems, who have grappled with
possible _practical_ solutions before they begin teaching, and who
understand their crucial role in creating meaningful positive change in
public education in America.
In the end, no solutions to the problems in our schools have a
prayer of succeeding without public involvement. Such involvement
includes discussions via the Internet-- like this one-- but much more
fundamentally it includes parents and patrons becoming informed about
what's happening in the local school districts, and then acting on that
information. Certain special-interest groups have already figured this
out, and they're busy making their voices heard. What about the rest of
us?
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