Reply to Lack of Social Promotion at BASIS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just to expose people to some thoughts (and research!) on the subject of retention, check out this article:

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar08/vol65/num06/Grade-Retention.aspx

Early and steady intervention is the key to success here. That may mean longer days and summer academic programs.[/quote]

It is interesting that the studies seem focused exclusively on the educational and social impact of a policy of retention on the retained student.  Perhaps I was not reading carefully, but I saw no mention of studies gauging the impact of a policy of retention on the retained student's peers.

When a student is retained, not only does he get a second chance to master the material he is having trouble with, but his peers get a chance to advance to more challenging material without the burden of devoting class time to remediation.

It is difficult enough to teach Algebra II to a group of students who have mastered Algebra I.  It is much more difficult to do so if you must devote precious instruction time to repeating concepts from Algebra I or Pre-Algebra to those students who were promoted socially.  How do you teach a child to factor polynomials when he has trouble factoring integers?

What do the children who mastered the material do while the teacher provides remedial instruction to those that did not?  Twiddle their thumbs?  Is that their reward for having studied hard the previous year?

[/quote]

So essentially you're saying the 7th grade could move on to 8th, without the distraction of the kid who couldn't get through 7th, because he'd be repeating the year.  But what about the kid from last year's 7th grade class who is now repeating it with them?  You think the fact that he's one year bigger and older will translate into one year more mature and somehow less disruptive?

Seriously, an urban public school is not going to be able to shed its student body of all the lower SES students.  Somebody's going to notice that there's a demographic pattern at work when 1/3 of the students fall by the wayside.  They might have to come up with an alternate track for those kids?  Don't know, but they'll have to do something.  This isn't private school, you can't just counsel out the kids that can't take it.[/quote]

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