Making Education Work

Heritage:

New evidence shows that ending social promotion – the practice of allowing students to advance a grade level without having mastered the content of their current grade – is having a positive result in student testing. A new study released on October 15th by the RAND corp., shows how New York City seventh graders who were held back as fifth graders have made academic gains.

The study, which looks at the effectiveness of the New York City Department of Education’s 2003 grade promotion policy, finds that fifth-graders who were held back due to low testing scores in math and language arts tested better as seventh-graders than did their peers who also tested low but advanced to grade six anyway. The policy, which put an end to social promotion for fifth-graders in 2003-04, has since been expanded to include grades five through eight.

From 1998- 2007 Florida saw the largest gains in NAEP scores out of any other state due to the reforms made under the leadership of Governor Jeb Bush. In the study Getting Ahead by Staying Behind, Jay Greene and Marcus Winters of the University of Arkansas show how ending social promotion in Florida produced results like those now being seen in New York City. In the end, students held back their third-grade year due to under-achievement were ultimately better off.

Huh. So, what this is saying is that setting expectations of hard work and responsibility are actually pushing kids to do better in school.

Take responsibility? Hard work? That's just crazy conservative talk.

And it works every time it's tried.

There's my two cents.