Rationalamerican: Retention and Social Promotion

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Retention And Social Promotion

Last edited April 2004, Last reviewed September 2007

Children are not simply short adults. Yet, many politicians, parents and educators act on such an assumption. Statements like "they need to learn the value of hard work" have been made about students as young as eight years old who might potentially fail a third grade standardized test and therefore be subject to an automatic retention policy. Retention policies seem to appeal to hard charging type "A" personalities who also sneer at the idea of "social promotion" for failing students. On the other side of the argument, those against retention policies have done a very poor job of defending automatic "promotion" of students having academic difficulty. The trick to solving this dilemma is grasping what children are, how they mature, and how adults can foster child development. Applying adult rules and consequences to immature or emergent minds is not the answer. Let's examine some basic ideas and see how they may be applied to the problem of retention and social promotion.

Children develop and mature into adults on many levels. The focus in this debate is usually on academics, but it is folly to pretend that children do not mature and take on new skills socially, psychologically, emotionally, behaviorally, and physically. The school environment, by deliberate design or not, has at least as much learning going on about interacting with peers, controlling one's own behavior, manipulating conversations, evaluating perceptions, losing face, winning praise and many similar hurdles than about writing paragraphs or multiplying numbers. Academics are but one part of development into adulthood. If the reader doubts the importance of non-academic learning in the school environment, simply think back to your own experiences as a child in American schools. More than likely your most vivid memories will be of playgrounds and best friends, favorite teachers, hallway shoving matches and lunchroom antics, comparing body types in gym class, passing notes in study hall, flirting with the girl or boy in homeroom, and similar experiences. More than likely it is more of a struggle to recall the first time you tried a division problem, or read your first chapter book, or wrote a really good poem. The point is this: the school environment is an important, even vital component in the non-academic maturation of our American children. Happy, healthy adults are not fashioned from academics alone.

Given this point, it is not a big leap of understanding to come to the realization that retaining a student and forcing him to repeat the grade he just experienced could have dramatic consequences. We will examine the academic issues in a moment, but first let us understand the meaning of retention on a student's being. His friends and peers have moved to another part of the building and they are on a different academic schedule. His classroom is filled with children younger and less experienced than him. He feels, frankly, stupid. On the playground his former peers inquire about his status or even tease him. Depending on his age, he may physically tower over his new classmates, sticking out like a sore thumb. He may be pulled out of his new classroom for "intervention" to try to correct the academic issues that caused his retention in the first place. Now his new peers will know he is "stupid" too. At best, he faces a year of repeated curriculum and daily humiliation until he may be lucky enough to blend in with his new classmates. Will this student find a desire to "buckle down" and work hard to correct his academic shortcomings, or will this student become dejected and insolent, trudging slowly down a path toward further failure and despondency? Research tells us the latter is more likely and that many retained students eventually drop out of the system altogether. The fact is that non-academic factors in the school environment are critical to the maturation of students. Retention does not promote the positive aspects of socialization, emotional and behavioral intercourse, and psychological maturation in school.

Yet, even if all of this is true, how can we ignore students that have failed the basic skills required of their grade level? How can we in good conscience promote Johnny who can't read or Sally who can't add? Isn't retention a policy that must be considered in extreme cases? If we automatically promote academically deficient children for social purposes, are we not automatically promoting failure too? These are all questions that are well meaning. However, the better questions to ask relate to how Johnny and Sally came to this juncture in the first place. If Johnny is struggling in math, or if he has a learning issue with memory or language, does it take a standardized test at the end of the year to point this out? Hopefully not. A reasonably good teacher doing his or her job should know within the first month of the school year which students will need extra academic assistance. The parents of those students should know too. As a result of such knowledge the classroom setting, the curriculum, the teaching and learning strategies and the student's attitude should be adjusted to cope with the deficiencies and to correct them to the extent possible. If Johnny isn't learning to read, is it his fault or does the accountability lie with the school, the teachers, the parents and the other adults leading his development? If he lacks motivation, is he just lazy? Could it be instead that the classroom environment fails to meet his learning style or that his parents do not value his education enough to help him with schoolwork and send him off to school with a good breakfast and a sound night's sleep? Would it be more productive to punish students by retaining them in the grade they just experienced, or instead to determine where the adults involved have failed?

Perhaps we need to change the way we think about grade levels. As adults, we think of levels of achievement in order to measure our success. Salary levels, higher education degrees, military ranks, job titles and other levels help us define our place in the pecking order. It bears repeating, though: children are not short adults. Instead of thinking about academic grade levels as an amount of knowledge learned, it might be more productive to think of them as levels of experience. That experience includes academics, social factors, physical factors and more. There is nothing wrong with a general expectation that students in a particular grade should achieve certain general academic benchmarks. There is something wrong, however, with preventing or damaging further progress of social, physical, emotional and psychological portions of a student's school experience in a misguided attempt to correct academic problems. If an adult is "retained" another year on the same salary level he or she is disappointed and may forgo an expensive vacation. If a child is retained another year in the same grade to repeat the same experience, he or she is scarred, constrained from maturing, and may never fully recover. Grade levels must be defined as something more than simply academic achievement.

What is the solution then? It depends greatly on asking the right questions. When we find students struggling academically, we must ask questions about the teacher, about the parents, about the classroom and the curriculum, and about each student's individual learning style. Instead of blaming the student victims, we must look at ourselves and examine how we have failed to create a successful environment for learning. If we do find at the end of a school year that we have failed a student, we must find ways to correct the academic deficiencies without creating new social, emotional, behavioral and psychological problems. Certainly it is possible to allow a child to continue to develop and mature with their peers while taking extra steps to correct previous academic issues. Most importantly, we must work at discovering individual student stumbling blocks early so that they can be corrected before there is ever a thought of retention. It is simply a matter of adapting our schools to our children, rather than the other way around.

To cite this article:

Painter, John. Retention and Social Promotion. (April 2004). Retrieved month x, 2xxx, from

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