Reply to S/O for people who oppose “social promotion,” who’s going to pay for it?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If schools intensively intervened in first, second grades, and third grades instead of waiting for kids to fail and not learn how to read it wouldn’t cost that much compared to all the money didn’t in literacy coaches and equity coaches and programs. The most equitable thing schools can do is to teach kids to read well. [/quote]

OMG this is so freaking true.

However, it is also true that school administrators make it nearly impossible to retain a student in Kindergarten.

I have a student right now who absolutely definitely positively should not move on to first grade.  They simply are not developmentally ready.  No amount of reading intervention is able to help (and I am very successful with reading intervention).  They are VERY young -- birthday right on the cut off.  But I cannot get permission to retain the child, as "research shows" retention seldom is beneficial and indeed can be harmful.  I'm so frustrated.[/quote]

This child's needs aren't related to age.  They probably have an undiagnosed learning disability.  Blaming age means nothing.  I have a young for the grade child who was reading long before K.  You need to get over your arrogance.[/quote]

I've been teaching reading for over 25 years.  This young child has been tested on phonological manipulation and awareness and is working at a PreK level.  If the student had been born ONE WEEK EARLIER they would be in PreK right now instead of K and doing just fine.  They are a year behind in K skills but have made some progress, i.e couldn't isolate an initial phoneme from a one syllable word, presented verbally at the start of the year, but can generally produce the initial phoneme now.   Knew zero letter sounds at the start of the year but now knows 8 reliably.

Unfortunately the rest of the K students are already blending and segmenting 3 and 4 phonemes proficiently and have mastered 23+ letter sound combinations.  Many are already decoding.  Some aren't but they have the skills in place to do so soon.

Not every young student has difficulty with phonemic processes, of course.  But if a student does, and is on the young side, retaining them a year is so much better than promoting them and letting them continue to struggle in 1st grade, only to have to refer them for a "learning disability" that would likely not even exist if they had just been retained or redshirted.

The mentality you express (that the child probably has a learning disability) is exactly the mentality we teachers are faced with when we try to retain a student but aren't allowed to and thus we must promote the student, i.e. "pass them on" when they very clearly aren't ready for the next grade level.

Please don't blame "social promotion" on teachers.  We aren't allowed to retain kids.  It is very very hard.
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