The Third-Grade Crackdown Club
They're at it again in my home state, Michigan--trying to pass, this afternoon, a bill mandating retention for third graders who aren't reading up to snuff.
I'm dusting off and updating a piece from February, 2012--with some new links and resources. Because this idiotic idea just won't seem to go away, in spite of a mountain of research that says it doesn't work.
The opposite of "social promotion"--the manufactured bogeyman some Michigan legislators are now blaming for illiteracy--is social demotion. In other words, public humiliation. Failure, writ large.
Flunked. Held back. Retained. It's failure, no matter what you call it. Imposed by adults, some of whom honestly believe they're instituting a kind of academic tough love--or at least, raising collective achievement data. Suffered by children who struggle with learning, for any one of a galaxy of reasons.
And it seems to be all the rage, part and parcel of the Invisible Hand School of education policy which promotes technocratic, carrot-stick solutions, pre-packaged by ALEC, from merit pay to performance evaluations based on student test data. Florida and NY City passed legislation mandating retention of third graders who haven't achieved an equally arbitrary reading