Social promotion is both a sign and cause of the system's problems. What Karen fails to mention is that FWCS adheres to a blanket policy of social promotion once a student is past the first or second grades. As FWEA's Steve Brace said, teachers favor a policy that gives them some discretion, not the inflexible policy we have now. Maybe the parents should be involved in the decision whether to hold a student back. Currently, the student will be promoted even when the parents request that they be held back.
Clearly the practice is now so prevalent that it's not possible to hold back everyone who should be held back without opening a few more middle schools. But holding them back with teacher discretion and parental consent would send a message to some that they won't get a necessarily free ride to high school like they do now. Right now we're sending the wrong message to all the kids in our middle schools, even the ones who are serious. And the high schools are placed in an impossible situation. They will not improve.
But talking about the practice as it pertains to FWCS, Karen, is another admission of failure. The public would realize that all the "changes" coming to our high school staffs as well as "High School Reinvent" will accomplish nothing but that the most important thing to FWCS is perceptions. Oh, and Federal money.
Let's see how Don Willis handles social promotion when he opens his first high school.
2 comments:
lets hope that Imagine gets to have a High School before it is too late...I can't imagine what the parents feel like having to send their 8th graders next year to FWCS again unless they are lucky enough to be able to attend parochial schools.
I would like to believe that an entrepreneur and former businessman like Willis would regard social promotion as the educational equivalent of the taxpayer bailouts for failing banks. Taxpayers paying to keep failing students in a classroom are just pushing the problem down the road to the colleges and businesses which will have to deal with them after high school
It's no coincidence that Ivy Tech's graduation rate is about 10 percent. Sooner or later these kids will find out there's no free lunch. The FWCS board members who sent their kids to private school should know that better than anyone.
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