Angie Sullivan teaches early elementary grades in Las Vegas, where most of her students are English language learners, and all qualify for free and/or reduced price lunch. She regularly writes to legislators, trying to bring them into contact with the realities of schooling as seen by a practicing teacher.
She writes here about retention:
This is the time of year when primary elementary teachers discuss retention.
Even though all valid education research states retention should only be used in rare and special instances, it has become an unfortunate political remedy. When kids who are not supported properly fail academically – people leap to the conclusion that repeating a grade again is the solution. Again every scrap of real research shows this is not effective and in many cases detrimental- but it is politically popular.
Nevada has read-by-three legislation that CCSD (the Clark County School District) is preparing to implement. Another punitive measure which will be detrimental and primarily affect language learners and kids in poverty – because of lack of access and lack of proper support. It will be primarily minority students who will fail en masse in some parts of town. Legislators say it is tough love. It is actually a lack of understanding of learning and a failure to fund appropriate instruction. It is an attack on kids in poverty which is the real issue. It is very likely that two-thirds of the district will be retained at grade three if implemented.
http://www.fasp.org/PDF_Files/FASP_Publications/PP3rdGrdRet.pdf
Read-by-Three will be a living nightmare in Las Vegas. At-risk schools will balloon in second and third grades. Students will be hurt.
How do I know? Already we see the effects as Nevada teachers receive students who have been victims of this type of retention legislation in other states like Florida, Ohio, Indiana.
Currently a Stanford student who was retained in first and second grades three times in Florida – is finally being assessed for a reading disability at my school. This looks like a 10 year receiving instruction with 6 year olds in a first grade classroom – awkward and weird for everyone. It is not socially appropriate and actually disguised the real problem and best remedy. It is easier to punish a voiceless child than work to effectively to determine the real source of the problem. This child in particular was finally removed from her mother in Florida and placed with a step-father in Nevada. It is highly likely, it was parental neglect that led to her current situation and multiple retentions. Nothing that was the child’s fault, she is now socially out of place and years older than her peers. She will be 14 in the fifth grade.
Other states who have put this legislation in place already regret it or have had to revisit.
Besides the national failure of huge retention programs, Nevada schools also manipulate scores by retaining.
There are CCSD principals who routinely fail ten students per grade level to manipulate scores. How is this done? Identify the students who scored poorly – force disenfranchised parents to sign retention paperwork. Student scores are “hidden” because retained students “do not count” in the scores the next year. This is done at many schools that supposedly showed “growth”. Is this good for kids? No. It is a game played on communities of color to satisfy politicians and a number system the community demands for supposed accountability.
Again -retention in large numbers is inappropriate. Nevada will regret it. It will hurt at-risk kids. It is a remedy that has failed in other states. It also gets manipulated, hides real problems, and punishes kids who actually require the most help.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/08/16-student-retention-west
Please read the actual huge body of educational research. Change for the sake of change is not good change.
Retention is not best practice.
The gauntlet is already raised against 75% of children in Vegas. Poverty is the real obstacle which is not resolved by a stigma creating law which is punitive instead of requiring and funding real help.
Meanwhile I see very effective best practice – like class size reduction– is under attack in CCSD school board discussions. The acccounting gimmicks and tricks at CCSD never cease to amaze and confuse most everyone who sees the public relations campaigns against educators and kids. Never enough money unless there is a trip to take or a limo to ride in. Teachers are watching and see it all.
This is why we do not make headway.
Egos, power plays, bad managment, people who are not educators, people who have not read real educational research, implementing expensive ineffective change that won’t help anyone in my language learning, Title I, 100% free and reduced lunch classroom.
Angie
Diane Ravitch's blog 
By June of the 8th grade year, any student 15 or older has a very limited chance of graduating. If 16 – almost no chance as we rarely see 20 year old adults on HS graduation stages. And 17 in grade 8 is almost unheard of. This is why, like it or not, students “age-out” of middle schools. There may be exceptions to this rule, but none I have encountered.
I have seen MS retention benefit students when maturity is the issue.
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Back in the early 1950s, I wasn’t doing well in school. I wasn’t learning to read or write. In fact, I wasn’t doing much of anything in class but sitting there. My parents were both high school drop outs—dropped out at 14 during the Great Depression—and we lived in poverty. On advise from the principal of the grade school I attended, my mother agreed to hold me back in 1st grade for another year. The princpal told my mother I was retarded and probably would never learn to read or write. My mother cried. She was a high school drop out but she did love to read.
In fact, in 1940, only 12.2% of persons 25 years old and over finished high school and only 5.5% finished college. My parents were not alone when they dropped out of high school at 14. (table 4 on page 18)
Click to access 93442.pdf
My second 1st grade teacher was the one who discovered I needed glasses. I couldn’t see what she wrote on the board or even the words on the pages of a book set in front of me. The world I saw as that child was a blur. That 1st grade teacher told my mother she thought I needed glasses. The first words out of my mouth after I had my first set of thick lensed glasses was, “Wow, I didn’t know trees could be so beautiful.” Before the glasses, the trees were just shapeless blobs of green and brown. After the glasses, I could see all the details.
With the glasses, the belies called me four eyes but with help from that second 1st grade teacher and advice to my mother from that teacher to work with me at home, I learned to read. Years later, we would also learn that I had severe dyslexia, just like my older brother, that might have been caused by my father being an alcoholic and chain smoker.
After I retired from teaching in 2005, I had laser surgery and no longer wear those thick lensed glasses that earned me the nickname of a Four Eyed Freak from those bullies back in K – 12.
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Exactly right. Retention for failure to pass a reading test is child abuse. What children need is not retention, but attention. Attention to their learning needs and their health needs and their social and emotional needs. I addressed this issue here:
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2015/05/retaining-3rd-graders-child-abuse.html
and here
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2014/04/attention-not-retention.html
Thanks for your efforts on behalf of children, Angie. Teachers like you are the advocates children need.
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Screening for dyslexia should be mandated.
Ignoring this is issue is educational malpractice.
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In addition, retention means those children will stay in school longer and that means more profits for the corporations that are out to destroy our community based, democratic, transparent, non profit public schools.
For instance, the for-profit, private sector prison industry is doing the same thing—lobbying for more laws that send more people to prison for longer misprision sentences and they have been doing this for decades.
The for-profit, corporate prison industry came into being during the Reagan years in the 1980s. In 1972, there were less than 300,000 inmates in prisons in the United States.
Today: “Many have estimated the total number of U.S. incarceration to be more than 2.4 million. This is in part because another estimated 12 million individuals cycle through the county jail systems in a given year for periods of less than a year, and are therefore not factored into a snapshot on December 31. There are also other mechanisms of incarceration not factored into this figure, including immigration detention, civil commitment, and Indian Country facilities, according to a Prison Policy Initiative briefing.”
The U.S. has more of its citizen in prison than any country on the planet, even Communist China that has almost five times the people but more than a half million fewer of its people in prisons.
How many children will be held back if this high stakes test, rank and punish agenda isn’t stopped?
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Let me HIGHLY recommend the program on booktv.org
“a panel discussion on money and influence”. 3 authors, superlatively exceptional ones, discuss Detroit, Science and sports. Intellectualism at its best.
This is one of the best programs on Booktv I have seen recently and it hits on the themes on which so many of you have posted on this blog. It is scary in the depth of what is going on in our country. This hardly begins to describe it.
Also, if you have time
You should watch on booktv.org also:the segment on
Jonathan Kozel. Superb. I feel certain that Dr. Ravitch will be familiar with the name. Sadly I wasn’t. [The great thing about Booktv, I keep discovering new faces. This is where I discovered Dr. Ravitch.]
Kozel is also on a panel discussion.
These can be found by looking at March 12, 2016 in their library.
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It is a pity that policymakers fail to do their homework before they rush to judgment or get influenced by lobbyists. Each state seems to operate in a vacuum in repeating failed initiatives. What are their advisers doing? The policymakers’ staffs should be giving their boss information and facts so they make an informed decision, rather than one based on popular myths.
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I can’t assume good motives but bad advice for policymakers. They don’t care if what they are doing is not supported by research or the ‘right’ thing to do. They care about power, money, influence, and making deals that are beneficial to themselves and their futures.
It has always been so. Some have risen above the greed and self-aggrandizement but far more wallow in it.
I commend you for being a compassionate human being but I don’t believe that most policymakers can be given a pass because they are misled or uninformed.
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I hope that Angie seeks out soon-to-be Congressman Ruben Kihuen in Las Vegas. Ruben is a Racho HS grad and very connected in the Vegas Hispanic community. I hope that he will have the info, desire, and power needed to make a difference. Thanks to Tony Bennett, we in Ohio know what a disaster the 3rd Grade Reading Guarantee is in the Buckeye state.
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Retention is stupid and it is shameful that the only alternative teachers have is to fail kids into oblivion or pass them without learning.
This is why I say we need a vision for the future. The system was never designed to serve all kids. Again I offer my vision for the future. Tell public education supporters to make their priority to develop and shout from rooftops a viable alternative to the testing fiasco.
Here’s my thoughts. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-personal-map-to-success.html ACT NOW
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I commend you for offering an alternative. I don’t believe that will make a difference, however, because those who are currently in power aren’t motivated by doing what is best or what makes sense or what is supported by research.
They aren’t supporting the reformers because they are the loudest or the most prepared and the alternatives are too quiet or unprepared.
They support them because they are the wealthiest, most powerful, and and most able to purchase their votes at the highest price.
This sounds cynical, I know, but after watching charter-affiliated legislators here in Florida pass law after law that enriched them and their families and then seeing the same thing happen in Ohio, North Carolina, and many other states, I’m convinced that the ‘right’ thing doesn’t matter much at all and offering a sane, sensible alternative will not stop the behemoth of profiteering and reform.
Good luck to you, though.
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Retaining students does NOT always fail.
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SPJ,
Please cite the evidence. Do you think that children in first grade or second grade should “fail.” At what point do you stop retaining them? Do you let them remain in first grade forever?
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I don’t think we necessarily retain because of “failure.” I have retained some K students in the last few years because of what I felt were significant social emotional needs that were not being met in one year of K. I currently have this retained student now and he has blossomed as a result. Perhaps we are talking about different definitions of retention here.
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I agree SPJ. However the elementary grades should not build the wall preventing promotion. We would be better served if we stopped grading elementary students for academic achievement with formal letter (A – F) or worse yet, number grades (0 – 100). Even the 1 – 4 scale still produces failure (ones and twos).
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I’ve had some success with retention for students in K, and I’ve built those justifications based on profiles of their work across the entire school year. I’ve made these arguments largely based on social emotional grounds and not grades. Our K classrooms are being lumped into the K-2 grade bands and not the early childhood or PK bands. As a result, some students are not ready for the rigid academics that count for first grade today. My only solution to protect them is to make sure they are as “ready” as possible, for better or worse.
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SPJ, retaining students in kindergarten didn’t used to be a big issue because kindergarten was play based. Children were retained because of social emotional issues. I ended up retaining my oldest, upon the recommendation of the teacher, and not starting my other two sons until a year later than they could have. My oldest son had no problem with going to kindergarten again. I just told him he had another year to play. He was relieved. When he did start first grade, he was ready. My second son had playmates who didn’t make the age cut off. I kept him with them. All three of my sons were young for their grade cohort. The extra year gave them the chance to mature at their own rate. Now, kindergarten is more like first grade used to be; pushing kids ahead makes even less sense, but we have added bogus pressure to perform making being retained failure rather than a readiness issue or a chance to catch learning disabilities early.
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Unfortunately, the typical school grading system and mentality is set up so that students who refuse to complete assignments, homework or otherwise, can fail. Sometimes they pass their classroom assessments and can pass with low grade on that basis. But at least beginning by 7th grade, conformity is the modality and there is little or no support for teachers or students who refuse to conform. Classmates know what’s going on and it is risky business to deal with these situations.
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This.
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Painfully, in the past decade of test-score madness, a separate problem with student retention (or the lack of student retention) has been developing in that as students are passed along without having attained necessary skills, their next-level teachers are too often very publicly and humiliatingly blamed for this system dilemma.
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This was going on in California long before the era of high stakes rank and punish testing, and it started in the 1980s when Reagan, the prince of darkness, was President after he released the fraudulent and flawed “A Nation at Risk” report that launched the privatization movement Tsunami to destroy to public sector, the republic and replace our democracy with an oligarchy.
The forces of darkness has almost it achieved its goal. If the resistance fighting to save the republic and the traditional public schools does not succeed with the 2016 election, I think that war will be lost until a bloody revolution takes place decades from now and defeats the forces of darkness sending them back to the hell they came from.
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Enter “Competency Based Grading,” which has killed my son. In my district, ONLY tests and quizzes count, and they are quizzed nearly every day. He does the homework and works really hard, but cannot pass the math tests to save his life. It doesn’t help that he has a spatially-based learning disability, but doesn’t qualify for an IEP. So he fails all of his math classes. Passing is also really big for the district, so the teacher gives him a D- at the end of each term, but that’s not really helping him.
In other words, this problem can go either way.
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Threatened, you have confirmed what I have been saying for years. The system is outmoded. Letter grades are lies. The pass fail system is antiquated, I individual differences are ignored and the list goes on and on.
It’s time develop a vision for the future, a viable alternative to the testing fiasco. Envision a school where education opens the door to the dreams of every child, recognizing that no one will ever know where or when genius will unfold. Where assessment is not cheapened by a narrow scope but broadened to encompass the whole child, where like life it is a constant flow of problem solving experiences and where failure is not only an option but a positive learning experience. And where competition is good when what you have to lose is a game or a meet or educational event. But never, ever when what you have to lose is your future.
Imagine a school where we seek out the genius in every child recognizing that kids evolve atdifferent rates and in different ways
Now this is a vision for the future
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My first job out of college was working as a teaching assistant in a residential school for “severely emotionally disturbed” kids (I have no idea if that’s the correct language any more). I wasn’t very good at it and I try not to use that experience to pretend to any educational expertise. But one thing I saw time after time is that the kids would come to us severely traumatized and very far behind academically, but after six months to a year of addressing their emotional needs, healing their trauma and helping them feel safe, their academics caught up rapidly in nearly every single case. Kids would “gain” 3 or 4 “years” in just a few months and soon be working at or above “grade level”. In my opinion, students who are consistently not working “on grade level” have other issues that need to be attended to or else the problem gets worse because their school failure further exacerbates their emotional or learning difficulties and leads to a downward spiral. Such spirals are even further exacerbated by retention. We do these things to kids and then we wonder why they don’t want to be in school.
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Yes, some kids fail because of trauma. But many others are just devoted 100% to socializing. If these kids were retained, other kids would think twice about squandering a year of learning. This is how retention “works”. It’s a tonic for the school ecosystem.
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Retention or no retention, to graduate from high school still means students must meet the requirements by earning passing grades and credits from required classes and in more than half of the states, also pass a minimum competency exam.
http://education.findlaw.com/curriculum-standards-school-funding/competency-testing-in-education-state-laws.html
K – 12 usually ends at age 17/18 and those who do not meet the requirements to graduate from high school on time are then required to earn a GED through another exam or classes often offered through night school or a local community college. Not graduating on time is also a form or retention yet more than 90.i3% of adults age 25 – 29 in the U.S. have earned their high school degree compared to 8a% that graduated from high school on time last year.
When I was still teaching, the district where I worked offered summer school classes for students to catch up who were behind in their requirements for HS graduation. The district also listed night classes in adult schools and community college classes that were approved for meeting HS graduation. Counselors met with these students to let them know their options. It was up to them. It was their choice to graduate on time, later, or never. The public schools offer the necessary classes. The teachers teach those courses, but it is up to the students to learn and meet those requirements.
I do not think it is necessary to hold back students who fall behind the average/norm as long as these options to catch up or make up are offered and the students and/or their parents know about them.
In most if not all states, K – 12 is not an automated assembly line that ends with an automatic high school degree at age 17/18 just for showing up on most school days and warming a seat. It wasn’t that way in California where I taught and it still isn’t.
For more details on a state by state basis:
http://learningpath.org/article_directory/High_School_Diploma_Info_by_State.html
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ponderosa – do you have any actual evidence (other than your own anecdotal “evidence”) that such is really the case?
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Dienne
You can’t be serious? You don’t believe that there are middle school students who spend the majority of their time socializing instead of completing their schoolwork?
Time for you to spend some time in a 7th grade classroom. getting students to pay attention and complete work in class is a constant struggle in many middle schools.
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And one of the reasons happens to be the “free ride” many MS promotion policies allow. Read this article and see how my school’s radical new promotion policy has dramatically improved the work ethic of our junior high students by giving them four+ “fresh starts” per school year.
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Dienne,
Strangely one of the white papers that Angie links to actually casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that retention is bad.
“The majority of studies conducted over the past four decades on the effectiveness of grade retention fail to support its efficacy in remediating academic deficits (Jimerson, 2001a). However, because students are not randomly assigned to this intervention, a failure to adequately control for pre-existing differences between retained and promoted students that may affect students’ academic and social– emotional trajectories leaves open the possibility that pre-existing vulnerabilities rather than retention per se may be the cause of poor post-retention outcomes. Consistent with this possibility, recent studies utilizing more rigorous methods to control for selection effects are less likely to report negative effects (e.g., Hong & Yu, 2008; Wu, West, & Hughes, 2008; Hughes, Chen, Thoemmes, & Kwok, 2010).”
It goes on to criticize social promotion:
“Although retaining students who fail to meet grade level standards has limited empirical support, promoting students to the next grade when they have not mastered the curriculum of their current grade, a practice termed social promotion, is not an educationally sound alternative. For these reasons, the debate over the dichotomy between grade retention and social promotion must be replaced with
efforts to identify and disseminate evidence-based practices that promote academic success for students whose academic skills are below grade level standards. The best alternative to grade retention and social promotion is early identification of students who are not meeting grade expectations and the provision of individualized, accelerated instruction utilizing evidence-based instructional practices and frequent progress monitoring.”
From what I can tell, none of these studies focus on the “ecosystem” effects of retention. But that’s where I think there is the most benefit.
Actually I think a rigorous, full summer summer school would be a better first intervention. That would be a stiff deterrent to slacking and educationally beneficial without removing the student from his age cohort. Still full-on retention would need to be an option for summer school to work; otherwise the student could just skip or slack in summer school knowing there would be no serious consequence for it.
For the record I think retaining 3rd graders for failing a dubious reading test is a bad idea.
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How dare those 7th graders want to socialize!
If students were ONLY interested in socializing, always and forever, I would ask three very important questions:
1. Are their developmental needs being met? (physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, etc…). If not, pushing more “academics” on them is wrong and futile. For help in determining the proper course of action, refer back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Let’s get some better priorities.
2. What is the teaching and curriculum like? Are students inspired to learn? If not… WHY?
3. Simply: is socialization not one of the very most important things in the life and development of an early-adolescent?
Good grief.
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It’s obvious that capitalist democracy isn’t working, so what’s wrong with republics and democracies that have a social safety net?
The OECD countries redistribute a large share of
their GDP through social protection (SP) programs,
about 19% of GDP in the European Union, and 9%
of GDP in the US. On average, 85% of this spending
is associated with social insurance programs:
pensions for old-age, disability or dependents, and
contingency for temporary loss of work due to unemployment,
illness or maternity. Non-contributory
social assistance programs account for 15% of the
total – with high variance across countries. In the
EU-15, spending on social assistance programs averages
3% of GDP. In the US, means-tested welfare
programs account for 2.2% of GDP; adding the cost
associated with providing health insurance for the
low income households – Medicaid –the total bill of
the welfare programs goes up to 4.4% (in 2000, see Lindert, 2005)
Click to access SSNPrimerNote25.pdf
What would life be like without any social safety net, without labor unions, without minimum wage laws, without unemployment, without Social Security, without Medicare, without SNAP (food stamps)?
If you want to know the answer to that, look up what life was like in 1900 in the U.S. when 40% of Americans lived in poverty, less than 8% graduated from high school with about 3% going on to college after HS.
In 1900, if a mother had four children, there was a fifty-fifty chance that one would die before the age of 5. At the same time, half of all young people lost a parent before they reached the age of 21.
In 1900, the average family had an annual income of $3,000 (in today’s dollars). The family had no indoor plumbing, no phone, and no car. About half of all American children lived in poverty. Most teens did not attend school; instead, they labored in factories or fields.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3175
Total U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million people, less than a third the population we have now.
The U.S. was the wealthiest economy in the world. Per capita income was on a level with Britain and Australia, was twice that of France and Germany, and was quadruple the standard of living in Japan and Mexico.
Still, most Americans in 1900 were living in what we today would consider poverty. In present-day dollars, per capita American income in 1900 averaged around $5000, less than a fifth the current level. In other words, the typical American in 1900 had about the same income that a typical Mexican has today.
Only three percent of American homes were lit by electricity. …
Life expectancy at birth was 47 years, and infant mortality rates were high. Of every 1000 babies born, 140 died in their first year. These days, fewer than 10 do. …
A man’s typical on-the-job work week consisted of 60 hours of work spread over six days. Pensions were rare; men generally worked until they were too feeble to go on doing so. 2/3rds of men over 65 had full-time jobs.
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/america_in_1900.php
I think that snapshot is the United States the oligarchs want the rest of us to return to and a perfect portrait of the Great and powerful America that Trump wants to return to.
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ED
You act as if you are chastising a first year teacher. I was clearly not talking about normal levels of socializing. There are students (despite the fact their needs are being met and the teaching/curriculum is engaging and interesting) that routinely get caught up in the group dynamic and socialize to the exclusion of all else. Placing the blame on a teacher for not being Jaime Escalante or Mary Poppins is an absurd abdication of student responsibility.
And I’m not Charlie Brown.
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RageAgainst, I apologize if I sound like I am chastising, I am simply tired of the entire theme that the most important thing kids can do is their schoolwork, and that they must fulfill “their responsibility’ as if the demands placed on them by others are automatically something they must do. What exactly is “their responsibility,” as kids going through puberty? If they are not “doing their schoolwork,” I am drawn back to the fundamental question of whether their work is worth doing in the first place, if it is being facilitated properly, or if they are physically, mentally, or emotionally capable of confronting it at this point in time.
If this is not applicable to your own case, it is true in many other situations.
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I am not a reading specialist, but I have dealt with more than one “readability” scale over the years and most of them are weird, extraordinarily hard to follow if you are writing for so-called “grade levels.” Early on I questioned, and could not find out why, for example, the word art was assigned to a higher readability level than the word zoo, also different assignments for the words yellow versus purple.
Apart from that, the mandates to have students “read by grade 3” probably come from one main source: The Annie E, Casey Foundation.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation financed one study by Dr. Donald J. Hernandez, sociologist at Hunter College (more recently at the University of Albany, State University of New York). The title of the study was: Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation (2010, updated 2012).
What has been suppressed in the arbitrary read-by-grade three mandates is the overwhelming evidence in this and other studies of childhood poverty as the predictor of reading scores. I find no evidence that this study was peer-reviewed. The rates of failure in reading were somehow calibrated from NAEP scores for proficiency. The owner of this blog has noted that NAEP proficiency sets a very high bar for reading. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s “Kids Count” interprets “proficiency” as scoring in the upper third of NAEP…so 66% of kids are always below proficiency. This is not to say that reading skill is unimportant but that the poverty indicators contributed mightily to reading skills as measured in this study.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation financed a related study by Lesnick, J., Goerge, R., Smithgall, C., & Gwynne J. (2010). Reading on Grade Level in Third Grade: How Is It Related to High School Performance and College Enrollment? Chicago: Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.
The Executive Summary, p. 1 states: The results of this study do not examine whether low reading performance causes low future educational performance, or whether improving a child’s reading trajectory has an effect on future educational outcomes.”
So what was the take-away from this study?
The major conclusion, Executive Summary, is: “Students who are better prepared for a successful ninth grade year are more likely to have positive future outcomes, REGARDLESS of third grade reading status. The sooner that struggling readers are targeted for supports, the easier it will be to ensure that students are progressing on course toward strong performance in ninth grade, high school graduation, and college enrollment (p. 4).
Nothing in this study supports grade three as the make or break year. This study has over a dozen references to relationships between non-school factors and reading scores–absences, foster care, and entrenched poverty.
Standards, and testing expectations, and many instructional resources in nearly every subject assume that learning to read is still in progress up to and through grade 3, with “reading to learn” the norm in grade 4 and beyond. I think that this implicit “one-size-fits almost-everyone” provides an opportunity for making simple, arbitrary rules that are not in the best interests of students and do not confront the poverty issue. The rule is raising havoc in schools and districts, and in the lives of students who are held back. It also provides a marketing opportunity for endless practice, testing, paper and on-line worksheets, and so on at the risk of amping up the “I hate reading” syndrome.
Final point;
The Annie E, Casey Foundation is also the source of the national “Read by Grade 3” campaign financed by other foundations and corporations. You can read about the investors here: http://gradelevelreading.net/about-us/campaign-investors
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Once again I am going to reiterate for the umpteenth time:
Retention negates all sound research in the field of literacy.
“Retention is the most harmful tool in the arsenal of educators.” (don’t remember who said it.) Retention destroys a child’s self-image and once that is destroyed it is almost impossible to regain it.
How very devastating- destructive, to mandate retention of third graders if they lack adequate learning skills! When medical researchers publish a finding, we listen; we had better or most of us would be dead by now. But when brilliant psychologist publish their research it is ignored. Some psychologists compare the destructiveness of retention to that of a death of a parent.
There is an alternative to retaining and social promotion: Use a sound reading approach beginning with the child and his/her experience in lieu of wasting time in drilling and memorizing abstract letters, sounds and words in isolation.Being able to regurgitate information will be of no use to the students if he/she can’t relate to the information in some way.
Give the At Risk student double instruction in reading from day one with a reading specialist working in tandem with the classroom teacher. Both the classroom teacher and the reading specialist should use a reading program anchored in the constructivist/
contextualized approach.
Stop all this harmful Standardized testing and use that money to pay for reading specialists. Get parents and caregivers involved.
Everyone who is responsible for implementing such a horrific punishment on our children should be made to experience the same humiliation they are imposing on these children. They mandate that the children read proficiently by third grade yet won’t give them to tools to do so. The Common Core thrust into the teachers hands a program that doesn’t work; its flawed.
CC limits higher order thinking skills to analyzing and comparing negating the imagination and application. CC also maintains that children should occasionally read on a level that is too difficult. However, children will regress if under stress – being forced to read on a frustration level. Forcing a child to read under stress can cause a disability. The number of students labeled learning disabled has skyrocketed with the arrival of CC.
The constructivisit/ contextualized approach gives all the support a child needs so he/she will not make a mistake. Reasoning skills are utilized along with all the senses. A happy environment, freedom to explore, confidence, a feeling of success, a challenge that can be met, hands on, and modeling are all very important. Teachers must begin with the child’s own words/sentences. Teachers must empower children by helping them take ownership of what they learned. Common Core is indifferent to the affective realm, to the child’s feelings, and utilizing the child’s experiences, instead it has caused the Common Core Syndrome – child abuse.
Further more:
The powers that be are dooming 8 year olds to life of submission, doubt, and mistrust in themselves – siphoning the life out of them by mandating retention. The powers that be are making false assumptions just like the cosmologist in the Middle Ages saying the earth is flat. Common Core puts the wrong teaching tools into the hands of reading teachers and making the wrong assumptions and consequently, the third graders are being punished for the sins of adults.
The Common Core continues to perpetuated a phonetic based program which, according to a congressionally mandated study of the reading program used in the No Child Left Behind law was found to be flawed.( Study of Reading Program Finds a Lack of Progress 11/19/08.) Starting the phonetic program anchored in the Behavioral approach in pre-K will not solve the problem. It just compounds it because we are giving the students the wrong idea what reading is all about and squelches their interest. Even four year olds want captivating stories – not the contrived sentences fed to them already at Pre K.
In a document published by nonprofit educational center, CELT, entitled “Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking” addresses the problem of different dialects in the teaching of phonics. “There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. .. The pretense of a single set of phonics rules is not only confusing; it damages people’s chances for school success. Most standardized reading tests have a section on phonics that asks students to match rhyming words or to identify words with similar sounds. …Out-of-context, uninformed phonics instruction is not only confusing, it makes the learning of phonics harder. And when the rules being taught in out-of-context lessons do not match the learner’s own dialect, it is that much more confusing and that much harder to learn. Yet another barrier for far too many children! ”
From my observations children who are successful as readers learned in spite of the Common Core Standards and are successful because they learned what reading is all about from home. Their parents/caregivers value education and read to them, interacted with them, and built up their background knowledge. Parents don’t have to be wealthy to support their children’s learning at home.
“The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. ”
Commission on Reading in a Nation of Readers
“You do not have to read every night – just on the nights you eat.”
Dr.Carmelita Williams former president of the NRA
Marilyn Adams states,“Children’s first grade reading achievement depends most of all on how much they know about reading before they get to school… The differences in reading potential are shown not to be strongly related to poverty, handedness, dialect, gender, IQ, mental age, or any other such difficult-to-alter circumstances. They are due instead to learning and experience – and specifically to learning and experience with print and print concepts.” Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print, 494pp
No program is going to bring all children – learning disabled, those with emotional and physical problems- on par with the students who were ahead before they began for obvious reasons.
It is not the child’s fault if he/she can not read. It is the mandates of the politicians, administration, teachers and the inappropriate reading program. Furthermore, the assessment is inappropriate. A standardized test will not give the teacher the instructional level of the student. Children should be assessed with an appropriate tool in a quiet, calm setting. When children sit in fear, start crying, vomiting, running to the bathroom the test has already been invalidated.
If we stopped all this standardized testing which is aligned to the CC we would have the money to provide for the needed reading specialists and smaller class size. We would, furthermore, have more time to devote to the teaching of language arts – reading, speaking, listening, and writing- all which support literacy. Let the teachers’ assessment be sufficient. Teachers’ assessments are far superior than any standardized test. How is it possible to have an unbiased standardized test anyway?! We would have more time to dramatize stories, sing, interact, and respond to stories supporting the children in their task of reading.
We must listen to early childhood literacy experts and not to the demands of politicians who have no educational background.
“As the old saying goes,
“… when injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”
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Learning to decode is the primary need of early readers. It is much more complicated than phonics/phonemic awareness drills and word sorts. They need these activities laced within texts that use simple phonics skills and sight words. The stories need to be motivating and interesting to the students.
Most of the beginning texts for our early first grade children are far above their decoding ability and intellectual experience. Seriously what six year old has an interest or experience in the labor movement? Why are they reading about the ecology movement and racial issues? While an adult might find these interesting or enlightening, most six year olds don’t. They are not yet ready to tackle the controversial questions of adulthood. These subjects are way beyond their personal experiences or interests.
While a student is working on the reading process, their personal reading comprehension suffers. This gets better as the student becomes more proficient. They need stories or selections that are better suited to their social and emotional interests and experiences to aid in their development of comprehension. Their prior knowledge is the key to their comprehension.
I live in Utah, we do not have a subway system. One of our reading selections on a test from our reading program was about the development of the New York subway system. Most six year olds have a very difficult time understanding time. They often get days, weeks, months and years confused. They have very little schema to imagine what life was like 100 years ago. Most have never been to New York. None have been on the subway. They had absolutely no personal experience to connect with the selection. The selection had many words which were not first grade sight words or phonetically decipherable. We all had a good laugh when our students answered this test question. What do people do at a subway? The answer-order food. Not one student had understood the selection.
When we say that the current standards do not meet the needs of our earliest students, we are being lazy or unreasonable. It is the political posturing and misunderstanding of student needs that is causing our students to fail.
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Firstgrademonkey, most insightful! The same could be said about children from the midwest – for sure the rural area. I am wondering if you are free to implement Marie Clay’s program or at least her philosophy and method of teaching? Relating all new knowledge to the child’s experience is given. When will the Powers that Be ever learn? When will they ever learn?!
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Research on the destruction of retention:
Karen Kelly
in Harvard Education Letter Jan./Feb. 1999, stated that the retention /promotion debate follows a 7 to 8 year cycle. Once politicians realize the negative side effects, they back off.
When she wrote about retention for Harvard Education Letter in 1999 she stated that politician viewed retention as a remedy.
’99 Harvard Graduate School of Ed. Karen Kelly published and extensive report of the harmfulness of retention.
“Retention vs.Social promotion: Schools Search for Alternatives”
“..research has shown that the practice does more harm than good. Retention harmed students achievement, attendance record, personal adjustment in school, and attitude toward school…. Retaining doesn’t solve the problem……retainees are more likely to drop out of school…..”
In another study in 1992 Grade Retention Doesn’t Work
by Arthur Reynolds, Judy Temple, & Ann McCoy
with students in the Chicago area, poor performers who had been promoted, moved eight months ahead of their peers who had been retained. They found students who repeated a year were 20 to 30 % more likely to drop out of school. Students who were retained twice had a probability of dropping out of nearly 100%.
They site Chicago data revealing that retention actually harmed scholastic development because:
Using arbitrary cut-off scores on standardized tests to determine retention status is not restrictive but holds students alone responsible for what may in fact be caused by poor instruction or disruptive learning environments.
Longitudinal study of 1,539 students of Chicago who were retained did not improve their academic performance in comparison to other students their age or other students in their third grade. Students fell further and further behind.
Contributes to the school dropout problem- 42% increase in early drop out.
“Once a student is retained they usually get no special help with their schooling. They are often placed in low academic tracks only to repeat the previous year’s instruction and ultimately disengage from school.”
An example of a successful alternative program: Chicago public schools’ own Child Parent Center and Expansion Program, a 30-year-old program for preschool to 3rd grade with parent involvement and small classes.
Philip Bower
in his research published in the NASP 1998 states:
Retained students rarely make significant academic progress in the retained year.
1st or 2nd graders who show improvement over non-retained under-achieving peers quickly lose that advantage. The two groups soon perform the same academically; however the retained group will develop measurable deficits in mental health.
A single retention increase one’s probability of dropping out by 21-27%.
The stigma of retention will damage self-concept and create a negative attitude towards school to a much greater degree than most educators will predict beforehand or recognize in later years.
The most common retainee is a non-white male, small of stature, from a low-in-come-family with parents uninvolved in schooling.
“Old for grade” adolescents are at increased risk for substance abuse, earlier age of sexual debut, behavioral problems and emotions distress, including suicidal thoughts.”
Debrorah Crockett, Pres. NASP 1998
In same publication Of NASP, Crockett states:
NASP says Social Promotion and Retention are failed p
“Retaining a child in third grade because the child can’t read is child neglect on the part of the school, and so is social promotion…. retention punishes the victim of poor instruction and that social promotion denies the worth of those children promoted without skills.”
“Research shows that these children fair no better, academically, after being retained. These children more frequently drop out of school, never earning the diploma needed to enter the job market or attend college.”
The cost of effective remediation and support for At Risk children is far less that the cost of an extra year in school.
Political leaders, in good conscience, must listen to the experts in the field and not follow their gut feelings nor be guided by the results of one test that is too often invalid. Power does not make right.
And the list goes on…
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Thank you Mary.
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Today my grandson turned my thoughts to all those third graders who are punished via retention because they are not scoring satisfactorily on the standardized test. I cry for them.
My daughter heard sounds coming from her three -year-old son’s bedroom. She went in to check and there he was picture reading Brown Bear Brown Bear. He turned to her and asked, “Mommy, am I right?” All my children and in turn my grandchildren value reading because they were read to from birth on. They now have a desire to read independently; it is not being forced on them. My other three-year-old grandson walked into the house with a book in his hand that he wanted to read to me.
Picture reading is the first step on the road to reading. How many K and Pre K make room in their schedule for “picture reading” or doesn’t the CC allow it? How about dramatizing stories the teacher reads? How many K teachers have “Shared Reading” their sudents using big books so the children to follow along as he/she slides her marker under the text ? How many K teachers have “Shared Writing”? Modeling is an essential to teaching or doesn’t CC allow it?
Presently our educational system is turned upside down- driven by the “bottom-up approach,” direct approach in lieu of the “top-down“ approach. My grandson illustrated the results of the “top down” approach. Parents and teachers need to be kid watchers and follow their lead at times.
Presently the “bottom- up”- the approach of the CCSS, is driven by logic and gut feelings. Logic convinces some people that children must begin the task of reading by first learning the names and then the sounds of the alphabet. Then those letters are used to make words, words are used to make sentences, sentences make up paragraphs… But that is not how learning takes place.
But we need the “top down approach” which begin with the child’s words. Working with the child’s words gives us his attention and interest so we can teach the sounds and letter names- phonics. The child does not need to learn the entire alphabet before he/she begins to read. Each day a new phonetic element is either developed or reinforced utilizing all the senses e.g., writing the letter/word on the arm, in the air, on the floor, on the chalkboard, on the paper until he/she owns the word. Predictable stories, poems, and songs accompanied with vivid illustrations which the student can relate are used as “hooks” or scaffolds to learn a specific letter/ word, skills, and comprehension strategies
How many of the third graders who are retained are given the necessary support and encouragement? The affective realm is missing from the CC. If students are going to achieve, their egos have to be stroked with positive feed back. Nothing fires a drive to achieve than recognition of a task well done. With the right tools and age appropriate tasks, students will reach their potential of achievement. The “top down” constructive approach encourages students to take on the challenge of learning because they experience success. The curriculum is well orchestrated by the teachers with the child in mind.
The “bottom-up” approach- CCSS’s approach is , “…endless practice, testing, paper and on-line worksheets, and so on at the risk of amping up the “I hate reading” syndrome,” as Laura stated, is counterproductive.
The Common Core Standards’ are curriculum centered – they are just interested in facts. But the curriculum and the children are interdependent – two sides of the same coin. If you don’t understand the child and his/her interests, experiences, and abilities the curriculum won’t work – you can’t make the connection. We can’t just be content centered like the CC mandates. Educators must be interested in the prior knowledge, abilities, and experiences. We can’t educate a child from East Cupcake, Idaho the same way as you teach a child in NYC. Laura’s example from the first grade reading tests vouches for that.
In an article entitled “More NC third graders retained for poor reading” http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article38260386.html
stated that 1 in 7 were retained because “they were not reading well.” The non-English and certain disabilities were exempt.
I find it so absurd that a legislative body passes a law about holding back struggling third graders or any student!!!! How dare the ignoramuses take on the role of the informed teachers!
Michigan was another such state : “House OKs bill to hold back struggling third graders”
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/10/15/teacher-evaluation-michigan-house-third-grade-reading-retention/73928536/
Mississippi retained 5,600 as stated in an article entitled, “As Mississippi delivers bad news to 5,600 third graders, stressed-out parents say there must be a better way”
What a horrendous way to start out one’s academic career!! The powers that be don’t care about the affective realm. They don’t care about the students’ self-image or how important a good self-image is to a child’s success in reading.
Another problem: I suspect any state with a heavy accent will have a super amount of struggling third graders. After all they have a double task to master while their counterparts in other northern states don’t. They not only have to learn the standard phonics but then the students have to translate the sounds into their language.
Listen to the NYC Police Commissioner, William Bratton; he has to be from Boston. He doesn’t pronounce the R’s. At some point, if the teachers are going to have to adhere to the CC Standards, they too, have a double task.
How long are parents and educators going to take the back seat and let legislatures and uninformed people in position of power destroy our children?!
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I’m with you, Mary, but you are probably throwing some people with your switching the way we usually think of “top down.” Top down has been used to refer to the interference of the learning process by those, like legislators, who don’t know what they are talking about from above. Bottom up would be your grandson and the teachers and parents who understand the importance of learner input. You have also probably upset some strict phonics people who are mumbling under their breath about whole language as well. I don’t think I have ever seen the whole language approach the way it is described by those who who are Orton-Gillingham devotees. I love Orton-Gillingham but not without all the rich shared reading and writing activities. I sat next to a little girl working with her classmate as she “read” to herself one of the Dr. Seuss books. She was picture reading it with an occasional leap into decoding when a word leapt out at her. When I finished with her neighbor, we went on to read together and worked on decoding a few of the words that challenged her.
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2old to teach, you are right – I may be confusing people by throwing in the old terminology
of “top-down” and “bottom-up”. The terms mean different things to different people. “Bottom-up,” a Behaviorist approach, to me refers to programs anchored in phonics. The constructivist / contextualized terms are more meaningful. Both the child and the curriculum are interdependent- both are important. CC ignores the child; learning facts is their objective.
Aspects of the Orton-Gillingham approach can be applied to the Contextualized approach
but that approach is curriculum centered. As a Congressional study on reading revealed that the phonetic approach helps children decode- pronounce words- but comprehension lags behind.
The important thing: who is going to start a revolution to defend our children? Legislatures aren’t listening to Dr. Ravitch and her followers.
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If enough parents opted out of the tests, legislators would listen, because they are next. Parents in NY proved what a powerful message opt out sends if enough parents act.
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The more parent opt out the better. However, if we don’t offer a vision for the future, they will go back to a warmed up version of the same old thing.
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” As a Congressional study on reading revealed that the phonetic approach helps children decode- pronounce words- but comprehension lags behind”
Don’t I know it! Some of my Latino high school students were seemingly fluent readers. Ask them what they read, though, and they had no idea. With my younger struggling readers, phonics was definitely an important part of the program, but the constructivist elements of the program gave them the reason for reading and was, therefore, a strong motivating factor. Task analysis is a useful exercise and can influence instruction, but it is totally destructive if it is used for the basis of instruction because in breaking down a particular task it is very easy to find that you have stripped any motivating factors out as well.
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