|
The following are common arguments regarding this practice.
Arguments against social promotion
Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education. As a result, when the child gets to high school they will probably be forced to be retained or attend summer school. Studies have shown that the high school student that is being retained would be inexcusably painful for a student emotionally because high school students are more vulnerable to change; they are experiencing a lot of pressure because of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Opponents of social promotion argue that it has the following negative impacts:
Students who are promoted cannot do the work
Students will have many failures in the high school years which will most likely lead to dropping out
It sends the message to all students that they can get by without working hard
It forces teachers to deal with under-prepared students while trying to teach the prepared
It gives parents a false sense of their children's progress
Some hold that most students at the elementary school level don't take their education seriously and therefore retention is most likely not to be effective. Since most middle school students value their education more, retention should be used if they are judged not to have adequate skills before entering high school.
Arguments for social promotion
Opponents of "no social promotion" policies do not defend social promotion so much as say that retention is even worse. They argue that retention is not a cost-effective response to poor performance when compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as additional tutoring and summer school. They point to a wide range of research findings that show no advantage to, or even harm from, retention, and the tendency for gains from retention to wash out.
Harm from retention cited by these critics include:
Increased drop-out rates of retained students over time
No evidence of long-term academic benefit for retained students
Increased rates of dangerous behaviors such as drinking, drug-use, crime, and teenage pregnancy among retained students as compared with similarly performing promoted students.
Critics of retention also note that retention has hard dollar costs for school systems: requiring a student to repeat a grade is essentially to add one student for a year to the school system, assuming that the student does in fact stay in the system until graduating from high school. |
