An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Ten years ago, the National Association of School Psychologists published a position paper claiming that retention — holding a child back in grade school — damaged self-esteem. Based on NASP’s biased and shoddy research, most public school systems abolished the practice or, at the very least, restricted it to the most extreme of cases.

One consequence has been that special education rolls have burgeoned as children who would once have “flunked” are now labeled and moved on. This, of course, means that a significant and ever-growing number of children are unable to perform at grade level, which further means our kids come in dead-last on international achievement tests, causing a loss of national self-esteem.

In this year’s State of the Union address, President Clinton called for an end to social promotion. A bill now pending in Congress would set aside $1.5 billion over five years to help up to 50 school districts across the country begin tying advancement to achievement. In case you don’t feel like doing the math, that’s an average of $30 million per system.

This money will not only be spent to fund the “hard” costs of retention — including more teachers, classroom space and instructional materials — but also on tutoring and other programs designed to help retained children do better the next time around.

Putting an end to social promotion is a good thing. Retaining children, however, is a silly thing. A child who has mastered only 50 percent of the material in his present grade has no business going to the next grade, but he has no business repeating the same grade, either. Doing so will waste at least 50 percent of his time for a year. This problem is easily resolved by installing transitional grades between kindergarten and first grade, first and second, and (maybe) second and third.

Here’s how that would work: All children would enter kindergarten on schedule (i.e., regardless of late birthdays). At the end of the year, every child would be promoted; some 80 percent to first grade and some 20 percent to K-Plus (or Pre-One, or whatever). At the end of the following year, the latter would be promoted to first grade. Not every child who needs to be retained will be identified in kindergarten. Furthermore, a small number of kids will need to be retained more than once. Therefore, at least one more transitional grade — between first and second grades — will be required.

In fact, a few school systems have already experimented with transitional grades (TG), and according to every TG teacher with whom I’ve ever spoken, successfully so. To my knowledge, in nearly every case, the experiment was abandoned after a few years at most.

The reality is that transitional grades are expensive, at least in the short run. In the end, they would pay off handsomely in terms of lowered drop-out rates, and therefore, lower levels of the sorts of anti-social behaviors associated with poverty. But public school administrators operate on a one-year plan, which is their budget term. Even if the money can be scraped together to fund them, TG experiments will be the first cut in the next budget crunch.

Transitional grades upset apple carts. Used properly, they would reduce, and considerably so, the number of children in special education programs. This threatens, among others, NASP and the National Education Association, two of the biggest players going in the public education establishment. It’s anyone’s best guess, therefore, whether any of the aforementioned $1.5 billion will be earmarked TG. If not, then we’ll end up trading one educational problem for another.

Transitional grades is an idea whose time has come, but making it happen is going to require an upsurge of grassroots advocacy. Here, then, is the perfect project for the National Parent-Teacher Association. It could well be that America’s future rests upon it.