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Social Promotion = Academic Failure
Here is more vindication for parents whose kids were promoted to the next grade even though they weren’t ready. This study by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters extends earlier research that followed retained students for two years and found they made greater academic gains in subsequent years than similar students who were socially promoted. The latest study followed some of the students for as long as five years and found that the advantages “do diminish, but they remain statistically significant and educationally substantial through middle school.” Professors Greene and Winters “hope to continue tracking these students through high school, graduation, and even college, but so far it looks like there are enduring benefits to ending social promotion.”
In the study - “Students subjected to the policy were retained in the third grade, were required to be assigned to a high-quality teacher during the retained year, and were required to attend summer school. Exposure to these interventions has a statistically significant and substantial positive effect on student achievement in math, reading, and science in the years immediately following the treatment. But the effect of the treatment dissipates over time. Nonetheless, we find that the effect of remediation under the policy on academic achievement is statistically significant and of a meaningful magnitude several years after the student is exposed to the intervention. Though we cannot completely separate the differential effects of the treatments attached to the policy, we provide some evidence that assignment to a higher-quality teacher in the retained year is not the primary driver of the policy’s effect.”
What really counts is the remediation and the effectiveness of the remediation. The kids who are socially promoted, never do received the remediation needed to catch up, and it results in students falling further behind academically then in the previous grades. The same could be applied with the retention of students, who are not provided with the remediation. In this study, a high quality teacher made the biggest difference, assuming the teachers had the knowledge and skill sets to know what the achievement problems were and how to fixed them.