Man bites dog: From the NYTimes, a pro-retention Op-Ed by a schoolteacher:
I'll never forget the little girl who sat with a book, ran her fingers across the words, turned the pages and pretended to be reading. She was in one of my first fourth-grade classes at the Beethoven Elementary School on the South Side and we quickly discovered she couldn't recognize the simplest of words, like "in," "it" and "the."
That was in 1990, when we thought holding a child back a grade would hurt his or her self-esteem. So while my pupil was noticeably behind her peers in reading, she and others like her were pushed through each grade anyway, often struggling so much that, hopeless, they dropped out of school at the first chance.
In 1995, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley began ending social promotion, but this trend might be slowed by recent changes (although Chicago insists that it is not "watering down" the fight against social promotions):
...the students who have come through my classrooms over the last 14 years offer the most convincing evidence that retention is one of the best things we can do for a child who needs that extra year to develop literacy skills. I began teaching sixth graders in 1992, and shortly after social promotion ended, I began to see students who were much better prepared...
Last week, the Chicago Board of Education made some changes to its promotion policy, including the creation of an intensive reading program as well as a ban on holding back a student more than twice between kindergarten and the eighth grade. The changes have once again emboldened critics, who say that our public schools are not getting desired results from the policy. They couldn't be more wrong. The new measures will only strengthen our resolve to end social promotion. The road to success is a long one, but we are well on our way...
My only regret about ending social promotion in Chicago is that it didn't come sooner. I hate to imagine what happened to the little girl who had learned only how to imitate the act of reading. I fear that for every year we allowed her and those like her to move on, we condemned her to fall further behind in school, as well as in life.
Posted by kswygert at March 31, 2004 01:18 PM