Failure at An Early Age

Fourteen years ago Louisiana had the dubious distinction of being the first state in the Union to require elementary school students to pass a state test, the LEAP, to be promoted to the next grade.  Parents, teachers, and principals in high poverty neighborhoods all over Louisiana knew what was coming, and all the "Lean on Jesus" test prep rallies that could be staged by parents and churches did not alter the plague of failure among 4th and 8th graders who were retained until they could pass the test.  Test results predictably reflected family wealth and income, as all high stakes tests have for the past hundred years at least.

Over the past decade, some children in Louisiana have been held back three times before moving from 4th to 5th grade, and one supervisor told me in 2002 of being able to hear a fourth grader's heart beating from across her desk as she had to tell him he was one of those children who would be in 4th grade for a third time the following year.

Aside from the fear of losing a parent or going blind, the greatest fear children have is failing in school.  Children's hopes and fears, however, have been filtered out of the data used in the cruel calculus of race-and-class-based testing accountability measures.

With fourteen states now signed on to another generation of inhumane schooling practices, millions of elementary-aged children have their second greatest fear realized each year as a result of a single test given on a single day that will affect, from that day forward, self-efficacy, attitudes toward school, odds of dropping out, and the future likelihood of incarceration.

The most prominent part of the failed child's future that is not affected is test score improvement over time.  Even the most avid testing-for-retention proponents' "research" finds that any temporal rise in test scores immediately following retention disappears before previously-retained third graders reach high school.  With such results, can anyone justify this kind of racist, classist, expensive, and degrading policy that represents a moral failing of monumental proportions.

Here is a clip from a journal article that sums up the research on grade retention, via Susan Ohanian:

The practice of retaining students in a grade has been extensively studied over several decades and the preponderance of results show that retained students do worse academically than comparable students who are promoted. Retention has also been shown to have negative effects on personal adjustment, attitudes towards school and school drop out rates. (Dawson and Rafoth, 1998). A sample of the research findings on retention:

• Some groups of students are more likely to be retained than others. Those at highest risk for retention tend to: be Black or Hispanic, have late birthdays (e.g., August, September, October), have developmental delays and/or attention problems, live in poverty, live in a single-parent household, have parents with low educational attainment, or have changed schools frequently (National Association of School Psychologists, 1998).
• Early retentions are not better than later ones. There is no evidence of positive effects on school achievement or personal adjustment by such practices as delayed entry into school, kindergarten retention, or transitional classes.
• Reading is the primary academic problem for which students are retained.
• Initial achievement gains may occur during the first year of retention, but a consistent finding across many research studies is that such achievement gains decline within 2-3 years. Retained children either do no better or perform more poorly that similar groups of promoted children. This is true whether children are compared to same-age or same-grade students who were promoted. One of the reasons that teachers often underestimate the negative effects of retention is that these effects may not show up until the student is in another grade or school.
• Children who are developmentally delayed are most likely to be harmed by retention. Particularly at the first grade level, large percentages of retained children are either subsequently retained again or are placed in special education.
• Retention is associated with significant increases in behavior problems, with problems becoming more pronounced as children reach adolescence.
• Students who are retained drop out of school at a much higher rate than promoted students even controlling for prior achievement, grades and attendance (Roderick, 1995). This finding is true whether the retention occurs early or late in their school career. For students who have been retained twice, the likelihood of dropping out increases by 90% (Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents, 1989).
• A recent national longitudinal study shows that the use of high stakes 8th grade tests is associated with sharply higher drop-out rates, especially for students at schools serving mainly low SES students (Reardon, 1996).
• Asked to rate stressful experiences, a group of students rated only blindness and death of a parent as more stressful than being retained in school (Byrnes and Yamamoto, 1984).

Some have argued that retention research has not looked at what has been called "retention with remediation." They correctly point out that a few studies have provided some support for retention. However, Holmes (1990) points out that these studies are similar in that they occurred in suburban settings, and included few, if any, disadvantaged students. Most retained students had average IQs and near-average reading skills. 

Retained students were not recycled through the standard curriculum but were placed in special classes with low teacher/pupil ratios and given considerable extra help. It should be noted that most of these successful retention studies did not provide remediation for the at-risk promoted children with whom they compared the retained children. In those that did, promoted at-risk children with extra help did better than retained children with extra help.

William Romey has pointed out that it's ironic that, "Retaining a child who hasn't passed a certain level at the end of June isn't really retention at all. It is moving the child clear back to the beginning of the year he or she has failed rather than working with the individual child at his or her actual achievement level." (Romey, 2000, p. 632). Romey suggests that children do not need to repeat an entire grade when they are missing part of the material-they just need to practice some of the material longer.

Despite the consistent research findings that retaining students does not improve long-term achievement and will actually increase the chances of dropping out of school, the SAS emphasizes retention as a way of helping students.

References

American Educational Research Association (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, DC: Author.

American Educational Research Association (2000). AERA position statement concerning high-stakes testing in PreK-12 education. [On-line]. Available: www.aera.net/about/policy/stakes.htm.

American Psychological Association (1997). Learner-Centered psychological principles: A framework for school redesign and reform. Revision prepared by a Work Group of the American Psychological Association's Board of Educational Affairs (BEA), November 1997.

Byrbes, D. and Yamomto, K. (1984). Grade repetition: Views of parents, teachers, and principals. Logan,UT: Utah State School of Education.

Cummins, J. (1984) Bilingualism and special education: issues in assessment and pedagogy. San Diego, CA: College-Hill.

Dawson, M. M. & Rafoth, M. A. (1991). Why student retention doesn't work. Streamlined Seminar, 9, 3.

Heubert, J. P. & Hauser, R. M. (Eds.). (1999). High stakes: Testing for tracking, promotion, and graduation. Washington: National Academy Press. [Also on-line document]. Available: www.nap.edu/books/0309062802/html/ index.html

Holmes, C. T. (1990). Grade level retention effects: A meta-analysis of research studies. In L. A. Shepard & M. L. Smith (Eds.) Flunking grades: Research and policies on retention. New York: Farmer.

Jones, M. G., Jones, B. D., Hardin, B., Chapman, L., Yarbough, T., & Davis, M. (1999) The impact of high stakes testing on teachers and students in North Carolina, Phi Delta Kappan, 81, 3.

Linn, Robert L. (2000, March). Assessments and Accountability. ER Online [On-line serial], 29(2). Available: www.aera.net/pubs/er/arts/29-02/linn01.htm.

Marzano, R. J., Brandt, R. S., Hughes, C. S., Jones, B. F., Presseisen, B. Z., Rankin, S. C., & Suhor, C. (1988.) Dimensions of thinking: A framework for curriculum and instruction. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (1998 a) Position paper on standardized testing of young children in North Carolina. Raleigh, NC: Author.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (1998 b). Learning to read and write: Developmentally appropriate practices for young children. [On-line]. Available: www.naeyc.org/resources/position_statements/ psread0.htm.

National Association of School Psychologists (1998). Position statement: Student grade retention and social promotion. Bethesda, MD: Author. (available at www.naspweb.org).

North Carolina Association of Educators (2000, September). Does the ABCs program pass or fail? News Bulletin, 31, 2.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. (1999). North Carolina standard course of study. Raleigh, NC: Author.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. (2000a) North Carolina public schools statistical profile. Raleigh, NC: Author.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. (2000b) A report card for the abcs of public education, vol II, 1999-00. Raleigh, NC: Author.

Public Agenda (2000, October 5). Survey finds little sign of backlash against academic standards or standardized tests. [On-line] Available: www.publicagenda.org.

Reardon, S. (1996) Eighth-grade minimum competency testing and early high school dropout patterns. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. New York, NY.

Roderick, M. (1995). Grade retention and school dropping out: Policy debate and research questions. Research Bulletin 15. Center for Evaluation, Development and Research, Phi Delta Kappa.

Romey, W. (2000). A note on social promotion, Phi Delta Kappan, 81, 8.

Rotthacker, J. W. & Mellnik, T. (2000, August 21). Test rules get tough on school promotions. The Charlotte Observer, pp. A1, A6.

Sadowski, M. (2000, November/December). Are high-stakes tests worth the wager? Harvard Education Letter, [On-line serial]. Available: http://edletter.org/past/issues/2000-so/tests.html.

Salvia, J. & Ysseldyke, J. (1991) Assessment in special and remedial education (4th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Sanford, E. E. (1996). North Carolina End-of-Grade Tests (Technical Report #1). Raleigh, NC: Department of Public Instruction.

Sattler, J. (1992). Assessment of Children. La Mesa, CA: Jerome M. Sattler.

Singham, M. (1998). The canary in the mine: The achievement gap between black and white students. Phi Delta Kappan, 79, 9.

Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century. Washington, DC: Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (2000). The use of tests when making high-stakes decisions for students: A resource guide for educators and policy makers. [On-line]. Available: www.ed.gov/offices/ OCR/testing/Testing Resource.pdf

Urban Schools: Failure by Design

GUEST POST: John Harris Loflin, Education-Community Action Team

Urban schools are not broken: Moving to a 21^st century vision of urban education

The crisis is not about education at all. It’s about power.

                                                                          ~ James Baldwin

The idea that the Indianapolis Public School System (IPS) is broken and needs fixing is the basis for the current local school reform debate. (See Indy Star 03.16.12, “A broken system” by Kelly Bentley.) This assertion leaves unchallenged facts showing wealthier communities have better educational opportunities than low-income. It doesn’t make sense then to compare schools across these communities and then pronounce IPS as failing.

Urban schools produce academic failure at alarming rates. Yet, this happens inside a system designed to essentially predetermine winners and losers: one set of schools has the resources that ensure success and another set of schools does not. Thus, the “failure” of urban schools is a success. Urban schools like IPS are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

Here’s the question: has our public school system ever attempted to realize the purported mission to educate all children equally and effectively? The obvious answer is no. Reality reveals decades of fiscal, political, and structural policies which deliberately undercut and demean urban public schools. 

This doesn’t excuse poor academic outcomes in many urban schools, but suggests the need to move past 20^th century ideas based on “fixing failure.”

According to The Art of Critical Pedagogy, on which most of this letter is based, there are two reasons why school failure in urban districts continues.

1. The Politics of Failure: Perpetual urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone must fail in school.  Here, failure results from the inferiority of the student, the family, or her/his culture and community. Indeed, this deficit-model of students is built into most schools through the existence of a largely unchallenged system of grading and testing which by its very design requires failure for some.

2. The Economics of Failure: Public schools are America’s socio-economic sorting machine--where economic futures are cast and people are sorted into their future roles. In short, some people must fill the least desirable places in society. It’s important they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, basically, that there is a formal mechanism (urban schools) to justify their place there.

In effect, the high-stakes nature of this sorting process plays itself out behind the talk of opportunity and the myth of school-based meritocracy suggesting all students compete under similar rules with equal opportunity. Still, in the game of education, some families/students have high levels of social, political, economic capital. This guarantees an unfair competition and producing the same unequal outcomes.

To change public education, citizens must challenge the myth of meritocracy and the hype about “opportunity.” The few exceptional urban students who combine fortitude and fortune to succeed in under-resourced schools play an important role in this myth making, confirming for the public that opportunity exists for anyone who wants it bad enough. This opens the door for others to say the reason some fail is simply because they and their families do not care about education or they haven’t worked hard enough. This is, of course, untrue.

The stratified nature of our current society creates a “social pyramid” with no room at the top for everyone. This requires people to be sorted, and schools are the “mechanism” used to resolve this messy social “conundrum.”

The fact that "opportunity" exists (currently defined as all children having access to public schools) helps maintain the story of a democratic and meritocratic society where competition churns the cream to the top, ultimately benefiting society as a whole by rewarding the most deserving.  Still, those benefiting most from this sorting process look, talk, think, and act most like those who already have power.

This is inequality by design and well documented. Our IPS plays a role in the perpetuation of this rigged social lottery: the nation's poorest are the most likely to be denied access to a quality education and blamed (directly or indirectly) for their academic "failure." Thus, with consistency, IPS disproportionately produces the citizens who will hold the least desirable and least mobile socio-economic positions and these positions will be mainly occupied by residents emerging from the district’s poorest communities.

If IPS is criticized as broken, then these failures mean IPS is in fact successful at enabling the results it’s designed to produce. We can’t call schools designed to fail "broken.”

John Harris Loflin

Education-Community Action Team

johnharrisloflin@yahoo.com