A pretty unfunny "joke"
The promotion policy in North Carolina is considered a joke, according to Phil Kirk, the chairman of the State Board of Education. Why?
In both fifth and eighth grades, about 75 percent of students who fell short of the testing standard at the end of the last school year were advanced a grade. In third grade, about 60 percent of those who failed one or both tests were promoted. "The policy has been taken as a joke by many school systems," chairman Phil Kirk said. "Students are being promoted who don't have the basic skills. The ones we were hoping to help are being hurt."
The State Board of Education adopted the rigorous passing rule in 1999 as way to halt the "social promotion" of students from one grade to the next, regardless of their proficiency. The new promotion standard requires that students in grades three, five and eight demonstrate their readiness for the next grade level by passing the state's end-of-grade tests in reading and math. Yet, when the rule first was applied to fifth-graders in 2000-01, about three-quarters of students who failed the tests were promoted anyway.
In 2001-02, when the rule also was applied to grades three and eight, the percentages of students who were held back remained unchanged from the previous year. In eighth grade, 2.3 percent of all students were retained; in fifth grade, 2 percent were kept back. But in third grade, retentions increased from 3.4 percent of all students in 2000-01 to 4.6 percent with the new rule last year.
"We haven't ended social promotion," Kirk said.
I'd love to see a breakdown of this. Are these social promotions common to particular schools, or districts, or counties? Is the number of social promotions related to the school's report card rating? (I bet it is.) Do minorities suffer more from social promotions than non-minority kids? What other measures, besides the test scores, are principals using to justify promoting kids who flunk the exams? Are any of these measures valid for the decision of promoting a kid into another grade? Are the principals required to justify these decisions?
Interesting, very interesting.