Paying for Passing: Why Social Promotion Will Crush American Society

If a pharmaceutical company skimps on research and releases a drug that wasn’t ready for market, the bottom line might look better for a few years. But eventually, health problems will afflict users, lawsuits will hit the company which will cost millions if not bankrupt the company, taking with it jobs and the dollars of innocent investors.

When a business runs a deficit for a year, they must make it up the next year. When debt builds up year after year, it becomes nearly impossible to catch up and the company goes belly-up, taking with it jobs, pensions, and the money of investors.

Why should we think a school where students are pushed forward when they aren’t prepared will end up any differently?

When a student fails a grade but is passed on, he or she carries that learning debt into the next year. For skills that build on each other, especially basics like math and reading, it becomes much more difficult for students to learn new material because they don’t have the prerequisite abilities, leaving them even farther behind. Eventually, the student declares academic bankruptcy and drops out.

Almost anyone who manages others will tell you people don’t do what is expected of them, they do only what is inspected. If this is true of adults, how much more true will it be of students who have not developed an internal drive to achieve? When a school says “you must pass or you will repeat the grade” yet students continue to move on while failing year after year, actions speak louder than words and these actions scream “academic achievement isn’t important” to students more than willing to hear that message.

Proponents of social promotion argue that students who are retained are more likely to drop out. Of course they are! That’s like hypothesizing that drug addicts in therapy are more likely to be unemployed. Is it because the addict is in therapy that he or she is more likely to be unemployed? No, it’s because the addict already has many problems to overcome. Rarely are students actually held back – an Atlanta Journal-Constitution study found that most students in Georgia are promoted despite a law banning social promotion – and the students that are held back have severe deficiencies to overcome regardless of how they are aided.

Another problem is “gateway” years come along too infrequently. Even in states with supposed bans on social promotion, students only have to show proficiency in selected grade levels. In many states, eighth grade is one such year. If I sailed along until eighth grade and was suddenly told I needed to bring up my reading level three grades in one year, over course I’d be overwhelmed because the system failed to tell me learning in sixth and seventh grade was important. Sure, my teacher probably told me I’d need these skills later, but “later” was too far away when I could play football or Wii instead of doing homework or studying for a test.

Schools want to more students to pass and less in- and out-of-school suspensions, and while this is a well-intentioned goal, too often it results in letting academic standards fall by the way side and ignoring discipline problems for the sake of inflating numbers. In business, sketchy accounting practices can cover up a poor year to keep the stock price inflated. Eventually, the truth will come out and an Enron-esque crash will follow, affecting not just those involved, but also rippling through the business world. The effects of the crash of the education system will be wider-spread. Sure, for now we can hide behind improving passing rates and lower disciplinary incidents, but unless “passing” once again becomes a synonym for “learning,” the effects will continue to worsen and society will suffer.

Students are capable of learning, but when expectations are so low, it’s no surprise that children choose the bare minimum to scrape by. In a world that is increasingly requiring a college degree to earn a living wage, issuing high school diplomas to students who lack the skills for college and the workforce and expecting them to become productive citizens is no better than the army sending an untrained civilian to the battlefront with nothing more than a flintlock rifle and expecting to win the war.