Every year, teachers and administrators anguish over whether they should or should not retain individual students. They establish clear goals and expectations and articulate them to students and their families at the beginning of the school year and reiterate them throughout the subsequent 10 months. They employ creative strategies to reach the hard-to-reach students. Interventions are frequent, and support is constant. Still, there are always a few students whose poor attendance, minimal effort, or limited ability (oftentimes a combination of the three) prevents them from passing their coursework. The next step is summer school; but do 60 hours of course-work in a summer sufficiently replace 10 months of failed work? And what about the students who then fail summer school?
I have advocated for retaining failing students, and I have advocated for promoting failing students in different situations. In some cases, I have seen retained students learn their lesson from the consequence of retention and master skills they had not previously mastered. In more cases, I have witnessed students lose self-confidence and perform worse than they had the first time. But the failing child is not the only one affected in this situation. I have heard students take notice of "social promotion" and say, "I don't need to work hard because I'll pass no matter what. She failed last year and was promoted, and she didn't even go to summer school." This can be destructive to the culture of the school.
I don't know what the answer is, but I think it lies somewhere outside of either traditional retention or social promotion. Teachers know their students' needs well and care about their success deeply. Educators are also creative by nature. It is time that we as educators use our creativity to address failing students more effectively. Perhaps the chronically failing students could have time built into their schedules to meet with a faculty adviser one-on-one throughout the week or to attend supplemental or replacement courses. One school I worked in had an extended 8th grade program for students who had failed the prior year. In this program, the school reduced class sizes and asked some of the strongest teachers to lead. The remediation and individualized attention that these students received was more effective than previous instruction had been, resulting in a high number of students moving on to the next grade level on their merits.