The nation's 2.2 million teachers have just finished one of those jobs that never gets easier, no matter how many times you do it. I mean the annual, end-of-school decisions about which students are going to pass and which ones fail. It's an especially stark choice in elementary school where children repeat an entire year instead of just one or two subjects, as they might in junior high or high school. The fact that everyone in the class - this year's class and next year's - will know the identity of the "dummies" who flunked adds to the painfulness of the situation.
Our educational system has gone back and forth on this issue. Sometimes we're for automatic promotion moving kids ahead with their age group regardless of their achievement. Sometimes we're against it. The current education reform movement is strongly against automatic promotion.
Their arguments make a lot of sense. A kid who couldn't handle this year's work is certainly not prepared for next year's. And passing someone who didn't produce is not going to help the kid understand that actions or failures to act - have consequences. It's also likely to promote cynicism about adult rules: You said I had to do thus and such to pass, but I didn't and I passed anyway. And automatic promotion does not prepare kids for the world of work, where failure to do a job is not usually rewarded with a new job at a higher level.
Automatic promotion, its critics point out, also can cheat the kids who are prepared to handle the next grade. Teachers are likely to drop their standards to accommodate the weak students who have been passed on to them. So the better students will be unchallenged, bored. And they'll get less of the teacher's time than the kids who are unprepared.
These criticisms of automatic promotion seem persuasive until you look at the other side.
Almost all the studies done on the effects of being held back show that the experience is emotionally shattering. And no wonder. A kid's friends move on to the next class while the child who has failed stays back with the little kids. Repeating the grade is not likely to be a successful educational experience, either. Chances are, students who repeat a grade will just get another run-through of what they didn't understand the first time around. And chances are they'll quickly tune out. It's no surprise that older flunkees often become discipline problems. And it's no surprise that flunking is one of the best predictors of dropping out later on.
Now, we've even moved this problem down to the kindergarten level. Five-year-olds can become failures before they enter the first grade.
The fact is neither automatic promotion nor repeating a grade helps most youngsters succeed. But we continue to swing back and forth from one of these unacceptable alternatives to the other, as if there were no other way.
But there are other and better ways. As Donna Reid Connell, a primary-school teacher, suggests (Young Children, July 1987), by being more flexible in the way we group young children and changing they system we use to admit them to kindergarten, we could head off many of the problems that lead children to fail.
A year is a long time, developmentally speaking, for five- and six-year-olds; it's 20 percent of a five-year-olds entire life. Yet, in most places, admission to school is determined by an arbitrary cutoff date: Kids enter kindergarten the September after they reach the age prescribed by law in their locality. So a kid who's barely five might have to handle the same work as one who's almost six. That's courting disaster for some children, especially the younger ones.
Doing otherwise would be easy. Connell describes how schools in New Zealand avoid our lock-step arrangement by allowing children to enter kindergarten on their fifth birthday, whenever that comes during the school year. No one expects a child who's just turned five to perform at the level of kids who might be fiveand-one-half or nearly six; the new kids are given time to adjust and activities suited to their own level and pace. New Zealanders, Connell says, are amazed at our method of admitting children to kindergarten in a block and consider it cruel.
Connell also describes the British practice of placing young elementary-school children in age groups that span three years instead of the customary 12-month block. She herself tried something similar in a non-agegraded K-1-2 school in the U.S. Both her school and the usual graded one, she explains, have kids working in different groups at different levels. But what the groups mean and how they work are very different. In the ungraded school, she says, the differences between children "are natural and normal" because children expect and accept differences when they are working and playing with other children of different ages. "There is no 'dumb' group."
Flexible entry time to kindergarten and flexible age groupings for children in early elementary school pay attention to an important cause of failure among young children. These approaches do not punish children for not having learned - which is what we're doing when we flunk them -- and they don't ignore children's problems -- which is what we do when we promote them automatically.
Sometimes when people get stuck on a question, they need to restate it so they can see the problem in a new way. That's the case here. We should ask: How do kids learn? Why do they fail? How can we tailor the system to them? Answering these questions will not be as easy as picking a side in the pass-flunk controversy, but it will bring us closer to helping children succeed.