Nancy Bailey writes here about a zombie policy launched by Jeb Bush called third grade retention. Students who can’t pass a third grade reading test are flunked and held back. Nineteen states have adopted this practice despite a large body of research showing that it hurts kids and leads to future failure, even dropping out.
Children who are held back feel humiliated.
There is one big benefit to this policy, however. Holding back the kids who have not yet mastered reading does wonders for the state’s fourth grade reading scores on national tests like NAEP.
Bailey offers specific ways to help third graders instead of humiliating them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What a brilliant way to insure that there are 99% passing rates on 4th grade scores. Then when the 3rd graders are old enough to legally drop out – 17 or 18? – they just disappear! Sure there might be some extra crowded 3rd grade classrooms – or maybe special schools for teenage 3rd graders – for the first 8 or 9 years, but isn’t that a small price to pay for 99% passing rates that demonstrate the schools are excellent?
Every time I hear Jeb Bush referred to as the “education governor,” I cringe. He has a degree from the U of Texas at Austin in Latin American studies. He has no credentials in education. His bio claims he taught ESL in Mexico when he was seventeen. He was most likely a warm body volunteer, not a teacher at age seventeen. He has traded on his family name and used his political clout to transfer public dollars into private pockets including his own investment in ineffective cyber instruction. We can call him an opportunist, but he is no “education expert.” If he were, he would know better than to believe that third grade retention is a cure for struggling students. It just sets these students up for more frustration and potential failure. Bailey’s suggestions make a lot more sense and are much more humane.
Sorry Grace…
One score makes you larger
And one score makes you small
And the tests that the bourgeois gives you
Don’t help anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s curled in a ball
And if you go chasing merits
And you think you know it all
Tell ’em a hoo-ha joking class driller
Has given you the gall
To judge Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the boss board get up
And tell you what’s to know
And you’ve just had some kind of
Thought-groom
And your mind is ready to blow
Go ask Alice, I think she will know
When logic and proportion have fallen
to test score read
And the daze night is walking backwards
And the head dean’s on his meds
Remember what Swacker said
Nut the test scores dead…
wonderful!!!!!
I love this, NoBrick!!!!
“To judge Alice when she was just small”
“you’ve just had some kind of/Thought-groom”
This is such great writing. Wow. xoxoxxo
“And the tests that the bourgeois gives you
Don’t help anything at all”
Excellent NoBrick!
So sick. And abusive. And ignorant of basic child development.
Children are on different developmental schedules.
And that’s OK.
Flat test scores; fat paychecks for testing and deform oligarchs
Where have all the children gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the children gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the children gone?
Gone to testing, everyone.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Where have all the test scores gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the test scores gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the test scores gone?
They’ve gone nowhere, every one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Where have the Disrupters gone?
Long time passing.
Where have the Disrupters gone?
Long time ago.
Where have the Disrupters gone?
To bank their profits, everyone one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn.
If you really want to think through a problem, a good place to start is the list that Nancey Bailey has made to think through the problem. Her blog posts always outline ideas that are practical alternatives to the idiocy that emanates from the bastions of illegitimate thought.
Back in the early 1980s soon after I started teaching full time, I joined one of the teacher teams at the middle school where I starting teaching. Ralph Pagan, the principal, believed in bottom-up management and he supported the teacher teams that made most of the decisions at that school.
Side Note: Ralph spoiled me. After he retired a few years later, I never had a principal that believed in bottom-up management like that. After Ralph, it was all top-down. Pagan, a Korean War vet, was an incredible, soft-spoken administrator that supported his teachers and fought district administration if any of his teachers were threatened in any way.
The team I was on met regularly to decide what to do with our students/children who were in trouble all the time. In addition, at the end of each year, we met to decide who to hold back and who to move on for the students that did not qualify to go-on-to the next grade or high school.
One year, we had a student who had been held back for two years in a row. That means he had been at that middle school for four full years in seventh and eighth grade.
It was decided to move him out and up to the high school because he was getting too old (libido) to keep on a campus with 11 to 13-year-old girls when he was 15, and he had also been a problem regarding girls complaining about he treated them. Some of the girls’ parents were not happy with this boy either. In other words, this kid was toxic to teachers, other boys (fighting) and messing with girls that didn’t want his attention.
Social promotions like that do not mean the child will automatically end up with a high school degree.
Since I am only familiar with the standards required to earn a HS degree in California, we all knew that this boy still had to pass all of his “required” classes at the high school level to be able to graduate from there when he was 19 going on 20. He also had to prove he read at least at a 9th-grade level to graduate, too. The state had a test for that.
I think that third grade reading scores are not really a very good litmus test for passing third grade. Poor reading scores are quite likely an indicator that the student has not had access to anything they consider worth reading. I was placed in remedial reading in third grade, but several years later and a move to a school with a huge library with a sympathetic librarian and a practice of biweekly library time coupled with liberal borrowing policies and I became an avid reader. Schools could probably do more to improve reading skills if they invested in making school libraries better(more books!) and hiring good librarians who could fit the books to the students.
It’s legislation like this that convinced me that those running for office should first pass a competency test!
Only a competency test? How about a test for sanity, too?
Student anxiously waving his hand, almost jumping out of his desk:
“Can I, please please please, pretty please with sugar on it, can I design that test!”
Sure, push them to the next grade, and then the next grade, and then the next grade, so that by the graduation they still would not be able to read. These kids should be ashamed, their parents should be ashamed, and their teachers should be ashamed for not being able to teach them to read.
“Shane Jimerson a clinical school psychologist, has shown that neither retention nor social promotion for students having difficulty in schools is appropriate.” — maybe just boot them from school altogether? Everyone’s life will be simpler.
It is amazing that of all action items listed in the article the word “phonics” is missing. It is not mentioned once in the whole article.
“Sure, push them to the next grade, and then the next grade, and then the next grade, so that by the graduation they still would not be able to read.”
BA, it does not work that way, at least in California. To earn a high school degree in California (and I suspect most if not all of the other states), students must take and pass all required classes.
https://www.calcareercenter.org/Home/Content?contentID=180
I taught in a public high school in California and the entire senior class did not graduate. Seniors that did not qualify, did not wear the cap and gown and get a diploma.
If the failing seniors wanted a high school degree, after they left high school, they had to take night classes and/or classes at a local two-year community college, or pass a GED test to earn an equivalent HS degree.
Public education is guaranteed from ages 5 to 18 (and sometimes to 19) if a senior has their 19th birthday during their senior year. After 18/19, if a student that did not qualify to earn a HS degree wants one, they have to do it on their own.
And many of them do. By the age of 25, most of the students that did not graduate from high school on time have earned their diploma late.
Just because we can lead a horse to water, we still can’t make it drink. We can force children to attend school but that doesn’t mean they will do the work to learn what they are taught.
Education is not an assembly line where all the children that started out at the same time reach the end together ready to graduate.
Third grade retention is without a doubt, and I say this without reservation, the most stupid or all stupid policies ever suggested especially by someone with zero knowledge or experience teaching the lower grades. Jeb Bush needs to the world a favor a shut his mouth in any and every regard to public or even private education.