Held Back | TIME

Lashawnda Walker is an industrious, C-average eighth-grader with an impeccable attendance record at Doolittle East middle school in Chicago. But a little over a year ago she faltered at crunch time, and she has paid a stinging price ever since. In the spring of 1998 Walker scored well below her grade level on the reading section of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Chicago’s widely hailed policy aimed at ending social promotion–the practice of automatically passing students to the next grade–required her to attend summer school. At the end of it she fell short again, which meant she had to repeat eighth grade. She watched all her classmates move on to high school. “I feel really bad that I didn’t make it,” she said softly. “I think about that test all the time.”

This spring, Walker, 15, the oldest of eight children, got another chance. But she failed again, by four-tenths of a point, on the Iowa test’s reading section. She is headed to summer school for one final shot at getting into high school in the fall. If she doesn’t make it, she will go to one of the city’s “transition centers”–an educational way station for kids who haven’t qualified for high school but are too old to remain in a regular eighth-grade classroom.

Her self-esteem damaged and her determination waning, Walker is close to becoming a casualty in the war on social promotion in America’s public schools. The idea driving the assault–that the performance of students can be improved if schools establish standards and insist that kids meet them before moving on to the next grade–has a simple, sound-bite toughness. It appeals to parents and teachers at a time when frustration with student underachievement is boiling over. Distressing test results released this spring in states like Louisiana (where 40% of eighth-graders flunked the state’s exam in math) and New York (where 40% of fourth-graders flunked a new state exam in reading) have only strengthened the cause.

Yet there is one thing missing: proof that cracking down on social promotion will work. Most research shows that retaining students in the same grade rarely lifts their achievement. More often it demoralizes kids like Walker–and increases their chances of dropping out. “With respect to whether retention is a good idea,” says University of Wisconsin professor Robert Hauser, who studied the issue for the National Research Council, “the answer is no or almost never.”

That hasn’t stopped the railing against social promotion by politicians eager to burnish their credentials on public school reform. In January’s State of the Union address, President Clinton drew bipartisan applause with his declaration that “all schools must end social promotion.” Last month the White House proposed withholding federal money from states that don’t come up with plans to end social promotion within four years. In Texas, G.O.P. presidential favorite George W. Bush made the ending of social promotion the centerpiece of his much praised education agenda. His state legislature is expected to approve a bill this month that will require third-graders, beginning in 2003, to pass state reading and math tests before being promoted. Four other states approved similar measures last year. Urban districts such as Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle have vowed their own crackdowns. In New York City, 50,000 failing students in the third, fifth and eighth grades may be retained if they don’t pass tests at the end of newly mandated summer school.

The enthusiasm for the hard-line approach started in Chicago. Since 1996, after Mayor Richard Daley took control of the school system and appointed his budget chief, Paul Vallas, as its chief executive, the city has used standardized-test scores to help determine whether students should move to the next grade. In the year before the new approach, less than 2% of students were forced to repeat a grade; last year close to 15% of third-, sixth- and eighth-graders were retained. The city spent $24 million last year on summer programs designed to give kids one last chance to pass the Iowa test before September. It invested $10 million in hiring new teachers to tutor retained students. If test scores are the measure, the stricter policy is working. Math and reading results in the elementary and high school grades are at their highest level in a decade.

There are other hopeful signs. Northwestern University professor Fred Hess, who studies the Chicago system, has found that the policy against social promotion has instilled a new commitment to learning among those kids who scored well enough to be promoted. Indeed, opponents of social promotion argue that the simple fear of getting held back will motivate slackers to shape up, and that the number of retainees will accordingly dwindle. “We’re not out to flunk kids,” says school-board president Gery Chico. “We’re out to improve kids.”

But while the threat of flunking may light a fire under students in general, there is little evidence that the ones who serve as cautionary examples actually benefit. Just the opposite may be true. A national study of 12,000 pupils found that students retained before eighth grade are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as kids who remained with their age group. In 1989, University of Georgia professor Thomas Holmes surveyed 63 studies that compared the performance of retained students with that of similarly poorly performing kids who were promoted; in 54 cases the retained students did worse once they went on to the next grade than those who had not been held back.

Requiring students to pass tests in order to be promoted to the next grade hardly guarantees that they’re getting a better education. Because many teachers feel compelled to “teach to the test,” students may learn to pass the gateway exam but be left without the skills needed to progress much further. At Doolittle East in Chicago, Alfred Rembert taught a sixth-grade class this year in which all the students were repeating the grade. Half of them were promoted in January. Rembert spent most of this semester preparing the remainder for a fourth try on the Iowas. “All this focus on reading and math for the test means they are getting less of the other subjects,” he says. As a result, school systems like Chicago’s may see short-term test-score gains–in part because a chunk of students are taking similar exams for a second, third or even fourth time–but suffer backsliding results in future years.

Most retained students never catch up to classmates who went ahead and struggle just to stay afloat among their new, younger set of peers. Karl Alexander, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, studied 800 Baltimore students and found that repeating a year benefited some at-risk students. Yet those retainees “were still just hanging on or barely passing” after they finally advanced. Even the extra assistance Chicago provides its retained students may not be enough. In the early 1980s, after a similar clampdown on social promotion, New York City hired 1,100 new teachers and put all retained kids in classes of 18 or fewer. But the students’ scores gained no more than those of comparable low achievers who had been promoted in previous years. And by high school they had higher dropout rates.

What’s most curious about the determination to end social promotion is that the practice is far from rampant. A study by the National Research Council last year found that nearly 20% of American students have been held back at some point in their childhood. (Among blacks and Hispanics the figure is close to 50%.) Just how high do we want the percentages to go? This year the Harvey-Dixmoor school district in Illinois tried to require eighth-graders to pass the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills before they could go on to high school. Of 172 students, three-quarters flunked. After realizing the impracticality of flunking so many (and withstanding a shower of complaints from furious parents), the school board put off its promotion plan for another year. Chicago’s policy, meanwhile, has failed to put a dent in the city’s number of poorly performing students. Last month school officials said that 30,424 third-, sixth- and eighth-graders failed to score well enough this year to avoid summer school–an increase of 10% over last year.

Despite all that, the war on social promotion will probably continue, part of a politically popular get-tough approach that emphasizes accountability in schools as the best way to get them in shape. To its credit, Chicago has poured $50 million a year into programs that directly target retainees. But that money could just as well be spent on things like smaller classes, individual tutoring and improved teacher training without also flunking massive numbers. “Retaining students,” Chicago education researcher Suzanne Davenport says, “is a blame-the-victim solution.” But it will last as long as politicians continue to believe they need to punish kids like Lashawnda Walker in order to save them.

–With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago

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