This week, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced a Nine-Point Anti-Dropout Plan for LA’ s schools. It has been criticized by the Daily News and others as being not all that different from plans that the Los Angeles Unified School District already had in the works.
For instance, both the mayor and LAUSD want to end “social promotion”—the practice of passing a kid up to the next grade whether he or she is academically ready to advance or not. But the difference between the mayor’s idea and that of the district, is that LAUSD is studying ways to end social promotion.. Villaraigosa just wants to end it.
In fact, most of the mayor’s plan seems characterized by more urgency than anything the district has thus far managed. LAUSD is, for example, spending $8 million dollars on eighty “diploma project advisers“— each of whom gets paid $100 grand a year. The district has then placed these advisers at 46 high schools and 34 middle schools. However, when I randomly polled some kids at low-performing Locke and Jefferson high schools to find out if they’d ever heard of the well paid advisers, the kids had no idea what I was talking about.
Which brings us back to social promotion. Here’s how it works:
A couple of years ago I was reporting on a lower-income family in severe crisis. The mother and father of the family were both former gang members, and the dad was on parole. Together they had six kids and, for a while, their lives seemed on an upswing. But then the dad was rearrested and charged with dealing drugs. As he fought his case, his wife and the kids went into an emotional and financial tailspin.
The couple’s eldest boy, a kid named George, expressed his stress over the family upheaval by suddenly taking a nosedive at school in which his grades went from passable—to all F’s.
The school counselor at Hollenbeck Middle School had 800 kids assigned to her caseload, so never called George’s mother to say that her son was crashing and burning. His homeroom teacher, a kindly but overstressed woman, never called either. Eventually, of course, there was a report card. When George’s mother saw it she went to the school immediately to see what might be done to help her son.
The school’s solution? Send him on to the next grade. In other words, social promotion.
George’s mother pleaded with the counselor to, instead, hold her son back. “It’s what he needs,” she said.
“Oh, we can’t do that,” said the counselor. “We’re not set up for it.” All she could suggest was that the mother should find and pay for a tutor, an expense that, at the time, she couldn’t dream of affording. A year later, when George reached 8th grade, his reading skills still hovered at a fourth grade level.
Now that he’s in 9th grade, his mother has managed to get him into one of the non-LAUSD, Green Dot charter schools that don’t socially promote, but have a full court press to get a kid up to grade level. As a result, he’s doing measurably better.
This same drama is being played out–albeit usually with less of an upbeat ending—with hundreds of kids at all grade levels across the district. For example, a recent report has shown that only 69% of LAUSD’s fourth graders are ready to advance to the fifth grade. Yet, most all of them advance anyway. If those kids continue to fall behind, without any help, by the time a lot of them hit tenth grade, they are likely to figure , “Hey, screw it.” And another number is added to the drop out rate.
So, yes. Antonio’s got the right idea making the dumping of the social promotion system a high priority. Sure it will require a new system of aggressive academic intervention. But enough with the studies and the hundred-grand-a-year advisers.
Just do it.
I agree with ending social promotion. As a high school teaher I get incoming 9th grade students who don’t know simple math, how to write a complete sentence and have trouble negotiating what is expected of them. I tell my 9th grade students that they have to pass every class in order to move the next grade and their jaws hit the floor. They’ve skated by this far and then reality hits. We have done them no favors.
I’ve had 18 year old 9th graders, they spend 3 or 4 years at school without passing classes and then they are shown the door without any idea of what life will bring – typically low level, low pay jobs or worse. We need to educate the parents that the stigma attached with non-promotion doesn’t come when the student repeats the grade, it comes when that student is 18, 28, however years old and not qualified to do anything with their life.
Here’s a take from a parent of a student that, after three years at the local LAUSD high school, has little chance of getting a diploma. First off, there’s enough ‘failure’ to go around and around — student, parents, teachers, admin-istrators, facilities, districts, and politicians. It’s difficult to be functional in a dysfunctional system. A typical uninformed opinion places almost all of the blame on students. This, I feel, is an excuse for failure that avoids a lot of uncomfortable responsibility. It assumes that most dropouts are simply noit smart enought to graduate. Teacherman, however committed, isn’t immune to this label of failure if his students don’t pass his classes. In fact, he’s standing right in the middle of the entire mess. In effect, he’s also restating the all too common illusion that without a diploma from an institution such as LAUSD students have few hopes of becoming qualified to do anything worthwhile with their lives. For my family, perhaps it’s time to deal with the fact that most high school systems in Southern California now fail on multiple levels and it makes little sense to continue throwing away our time or efforts. Maybe more students and parents should challenge what they see as popular misconceptions regarding the value of a diplomas from such troubled school sytems. With proper amounts of persistence, creativity, and conviction, there are viable alternatives.
When a teacher states that students coming up to his class are sub-par, then it’s time to look at the teachers who handled them earlier. Sure there are problems with kids, but I see the biggest problem as school administrations and teachers who are lazy, overpaid, and concerned only for their security. What’s the solution? Many people say that we need more money for schools, to which I say how stupid can that be. If something doesn’t work, having more of it doesn’t make it better.
Social promotion is a loser’s way out–and, I mean the teachers.
Jim, if you feel comfortable with it, I’d love to hear more about your kid’s experience. I think we are in terrible trouble with LA public schools. I think you and Teacherman are both saying that—albeit from different perspectives.
And certainly a diploma isn’t the be-all end-all. (One day I’ll blog about my own kid’s experience in that regard.) But—whether it should or not—having one makes a whole lot of stuff a heck of a lot easier.
Woody, even as a raging liberal, I tend to agree that, although I’d like to see more money for schools, first I’d like to see the money we have used a hell of a lot better.
About the teachers. In the course of researching education issues (and watching my kid go through school) I’ve seen great and heroic teachers who are amazing human beings and fine educators caught in a hideous system. And I’ve seen those other folks you’re talking about—the ones who need….How shall we put it? career counseling.
Per Antonio Villaraigosa, 50+% of the students who enter LAUSD do not graduate, compared to 30% in the state and nation. Unfortunately this problem is not caused by stupid lazy students or teachers who do not care or social promotion.
It is caused primarily by two factors:
First: – Parents who don’t’ make their kids education a priority. I am not judging these people as bad so get off you high horse – just facing a fact. Everyone knows that most Asian parents make education a much higher priority than other minorities, so we should not be surprised where their graduation rates is 50% higher than black or Hispanic children. There are many dedicated parents who drive their children to magnet schools, but unfortunately these are the minority.
However, many of the parents are so bad that only the state could be a worse parent, best known as the foster-care system in LA.
Second: – A much too large school district. Only some of the small pieces of LAUSD seem to work, which are the smaller magnet and specialty schools which seem to function in-spite of the district mismanagement.
A truly standards-based system of public education would blur the lines between grade-levels. Students would advance not through grades and/or school but through a series of increasingly complex standards in each content area (standards being what students should know and be able to do). There are very few schools that have really taken this to heart. Large schools and large districts do not create the conditions or systems necessary for educators to individualize a student’s learning pace and plan. Even in smaller schools, the pressure to “make the scores” discourages more progressive approaches to learning.
On another note, I have to take issue with the statement about parents. I have never met a parent who didn’t care passionately about his or her child’s education. I have met many for whom keeping a roof over their families’ heads or dealing with domestic violence or any dealing with any other number of survival issues takes “priority” over everything else in life. A comprehensive approach to education would req
uire massive coordination between all health and human services organizations in a community. It sounds impossible, but I am a dreamer.
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