A look at the effects of Florida's new retention policy:
At the close of this first year of mandatory retention, opinions are decidedly mixed. “Where you get the true perspective on anything is to look at the broader pictures, to look at the numbers,” said Larry Tihen, curriculum director for the Lee County School District. “Children have vastly improved after retention.”
Of the 601 third-graders retained, 406 passed FCAT reading the second time around. Of those who failed again, 114 had disabilities or didn’t speak English as a first language. Just 81 “regular education” students failed the test twice.
Tihen said the policy might save students from a lifetime of failure.
“Their self-esteem and their confidence and how they present themselves at school has vastly improved,” Tihen said. “One of the real values of this beyond children just learning to read is having children who feel better about themselves and more successful.”
If anything, more elementary school parents will be getting letters and phone calls from teachers suggesting they hold their children back. Tihen said the district wants to start retaining children at the kindergarten, first- and second-grade levels in the hopes that catching them earlier will yield even more success.
“If we can identify those children early, then on the average they make one to three times the gains than do students if we wait until third grade,” Tihen said.
Parents said they’d been shocked last year at the news their children were being held back. But a year later, their views varied widely based on their child’s experience.
“I think it was great,” said Patricia Kolecki, who has a child at Tropic Isles Elementary School in North Fort Myers.
Her son had about 15 children in his class with a teacher, Heather Evans; a reading specialist, Dacia Webb; and volunteer mentors Evans recruited from her church.
Evans and Webb figured out why Kolecki’s son was having so much trouble reading: He concentrated so hard on the unknown words that he couldn’t absorb the story’s plot, Kolecki said. The teachers taught him how to skip over words and learn them later.
Kolecki urged parents facing retention to get involved.
“I think the child is only to get as much out of it as the parent puts in,” she said. “The teachers can’t do it all. They can’t.”
Not all parents had so positive a view of retention, of course. But it's refreshing to see both pro- and anti- positions in one article.
Posted by kswygert at May 24, 2004 01:26 PM