Social Promotion

In the past few decades, several presidents, including President Clinton , President Bush , and President Obama , have called for an end to social promotion as have many advocacy groups. Social promotion is defined by the U.S. Department of Education is the practice of allowing students to continue to pass through schools from grade to grade with their peers without satisfying academic requirements or meeting performance goals at key grades. The theory behind the practice of social promotion is that it’s carried out in in the interest of the psychological and social well-being of the child. The most commonly utilized alternative policy to social promotion is retention, where students repeat a grade and go over the same academic content they

If they still didn’t pass, they would have to repeat the grade. With the implementation of the Common Core in 2013, and therefore tougher learning standards and tests, the rigidness of the promotion policy was relaxed, with students not being held back if they do not pass, but rather the students with the bottom 10 percent of the scores being required to attend summer school. Under Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Chancellor Carmen Farina further changed the promotion policy for students in grades 3-8: instead of promoting students from one grade to the next based solely on exam results, teachers and principals will now determine which students are at risk of not making sufficient progress based on a more holistic criteria, which includes classroom work and

However, the Chicago policy actually found that “while overall dropout rates decreased with the promotion gate, the gate had adverse effects on the most vulnerable students, and, at best, only modest beneficial effects on other students’ likelihood of completing high school.” The Chicago policy was soon phased out. In the initial years of NYC’s retention policy, preliminary data showed that some fifth graders did indeed achieve higher after being retained. However, risks of dropping out for students previously retained don’t start appearing until as late as eight grade.