Too Old to Fail Part 2: The Standards Movement and Alternatives to Social Promotion
This is part two in a two-part series about social promotion in American schools. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated a fundamental flaw in the American educational system. Every year, many students are moved on to the next grade through a system of formal policies and informal pressures. In the context of the Coronavirus pandemic, when many school districts have formally banned failing grades, students will enter into the next school year at drastically different levels. Part 1 discusses the origins and causes of this system. This second part will consider more recent history and alternatives.
Teachers and schools across the country have been incentivized to push kids through grades, regardless of their demonstrated mastery. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these incentives have resulted in many students being promoted to the subsequent grade despite having not engaged with remote learning over the past year. The consequences are easily predictable but also familiar to many teachers: classes will be filled with some kids who are years ahead of or years behind their age peers. This is neither good for students nor teachers: many students feel perpetually frustrated by academic struggles, while teachers feel frustrated that much of the onus for passing a class is placed on them and not their students. As discussed in part one, this is part of a system of “serving time”: the foundational measure of schooling in many American school systems is the amount of time sitting in a seat and not actual learning having occurred, emerging from the invention of graded schools in the 1800s and the move toward Carnegie units in the early 1900s. The fundamental question we must ask, then, is: is the best way to organize students by age, and should class credits be measured based on having spent 10 months in a chair rather than having demonstrated learning?
The final piece in understanding why so many students are pushed through schools and why “serving time” is such a central element of schools is the rise of the standards movement at the end of the 20th century.
While many people associate the rise of standardized testing with No Child Left Behind (NCLB)— George Bush’s signature education legislation passed in the wake of September 11th — the push for a national “accountability” regime started decades earlier. In 1983, the Reagan Administration released a report called “A Nation At Risk,” which sounded the alarm for America’s failing schools and called for national content standards — which, of course, were based on the assumption of a certain number of years of different subjects. The response was a clarion call for schools to become more “accountable.”
While federal funding for schools is relatively small — making up less than 10% of education spending in the United States — it has the potential to make big policy impacts, with local politicians afraid to turn down free money for schools from the federal government. Allocations of federal money are routinely formulated through renewals of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA), originally passed as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative. In fact, No Child Left Behind itself was just the name of the 2002 reauthorization of the ESSA.
President George W. Bush signs No Child Left Behind in 2002 (whitehouse.gov)
NCLB tried to walk a fine line that would unify both Democrats and Republicans, but it instead created a Frankenstein monster. They wanted to create national standards and more money for failing schools, a Democratic priority. But in order to get Republicans on board, there had to be strings attached to this money: “accountability.” And a certain amount of leeway was given to states to administer this accountability.
One of the ways this accountability was instituted was through “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), which required that states develop criteria for schools to determine whether or not students were meeting competency standards. The idea for this was to create an incentive for schools to actually make sure that all students (based on different demographic criteria) were actually being served by their school. Under the umbrella of “new federalism,” states were allowed to develop some of the criteria for AYP, secondary schools were required to include the four-year graduation rate as one of the criteria.
Schools that didn’t meet AYP would risk losing federal funding or being shut down. Graduate students in four years or face punishment. And indeed, graduation rates did go up — and continue to go up, even in the wake of the repeal of large parts of NCLB under President Obama. By 2013, the high school four-year graduation rate hit a record high of 81% (it had lurked around 70 percent from the 1970s to the 90s).
But this isn’t the result of better teaching. Rather, it was a result of more pressure on teachers to push their students through, regardless of whether they had demonstrated competence. The four-year graduation rate had never been a good idea, originating from Andrew Carnegie and the notion that the most important part about schooling was the amount of time you spent in a seat. But now there was money attached to it — and cash-strapped schools responded in predictable ways.
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Age-graded schooling creates two options, neither of which is desirable. One option is that students are socially promoted, passed grade-to-grade regardless of having learned anything. Students don’t develop agency for their own actions because they know that their actions are without consequence with regards to their promotion.
The other option is that students who don’t demonstrate growth are retained for a year and must retake the same classes — again, something that makes very little sense. If a student messes up in the first month of math, they are likely to be behind the whole year and potentially fail. Whereas, if they had been given two months to do what the teacher had anticipated would only take one month, they could have completed the course.
Already, many states have conceded that these structures will not work during the pandemic and that there is flexibility within these structures. This past year, many states experimented with dropping standardized testing and waiving requirements for seat time; indeed, it is hard to mandate seat time when most students are learning at home for part of the week. But what if we kept things this way? There are plenty of examples that could be looked at to guide what a post-Covid-19 education system might look like.
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In the 1930s, some schools were permitted to experiment with the rigidity of the Carnegie Unit—a seat time-based measure of what counted as a “class” for college accreditation purposes—under a plan called the “Eight Year Study.” This was, in part, due to the declining power that universities had over secondary schools. As university enrollment declined in the Depression, universities became more wiling to modify their standards for admissions. In some ways, this demonstrated flexibility is analogous to universities this past year waiving standardized testing requirements. These tests’ usefulness is dubious, and dropping them has always been a question of willpower, not feasibility.
The General Education Board — created by oil mogul John D. Rockefeller (the same one who the followers of Ferrer had tried to assassinate a few decades earlier) — funded the Eight Year Study, with 29 secondary schools and 200 colleges chosen who agreed to admit students based solely on a recommendation from their principal. The schools that were created as a result were profound:
Teachers developed core programs that crossed departmental boundaries and varied the time periods and size of their classes; students spent less time on the main line academic subjects and more on art, music, and drama; and the distinction between the formal and informal curriculum began to dissolve as students participated in community service, artistic productions, publications, and decision-making in school affairs. Teachers spent much time with each other and students in planning such activities.
But by the 1950s, the remnants of the Eight Year Study were gone.
Another example — the Teachers College Lincoln Demonstration School at Columbia University — also threw traditional seat time expectations out the door among students labeled “dull.” Combined with interdisciplinary, high-interest, and self-directed student learning, the experiment was a resounding success. In 1931, the New York Times reports: “The unit plan of work prevailed, and all discipline, as such, was discarded. Instead of compulsory attendance, the children were allowed to attend and leave classes at will.”
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Would nongraded schools work today? Schools that incorporate elements of non-gradedness, indeed, still exist in some places. One such school is the Madrona school in Washington. Madrona groups kids into mixes of three grades (e.g. first, second, and third combined in one class). This creates opportunities for multi-age groupings within the class based on where students are developmentally or what they had achieved the previous year. For instance, a teacher recognizing that a student hadn’t mastered history in fourth grade would have no need to fret because they would be working with the same student again the succeeding year.
In the 1990s, Kentucky conducted a massive experiment in multi-age classrooms. But many of these reforms were eventually scaled back because of the organizational convenience of graded schools and the pressures of NCLB. The Madrona school, too, which at its outset offered students narrative report cards rather than grades, has been forced to adapt their system into something more traditional due to demands placed on them by state standards, which demand that all students learn the same content in the same grade level.
Age-graded classrooms are not inherent to schooling, and they — along with Carnegie units and a fixation on graduation rates — incentivize schools to not meet students’ needs. Teachers this coming year will face unprecedented challenges: many kids will have gone at over a year without formal school, and students will have drastically different needs. Yet we have decided, as a country, that the only way to organize students is by arbitrary age groups. At the same time, new restrictions on class sizes could make standardized learning obsolete. In these times, education policymakers should be clever and reconsider the efficacy of age-based grading in favor of more personalized, humanistic approaches to growth and learning.
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