Word: chicago
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lashawnda Walker is an industrious, C-average eighth-grader with an impeccable attendance record at Doolittle East middle school in Chicago. But a little over a year ago she faltered at crunch time, and she has paid a stinging price ever since. In the spring of 1998 Walker scored well below her grade level on the reading section of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Chicago's widely hailed policy aimed at ending social promotion--the practice of automatically passing students to the next grade--required her to attend summer school. At the end of it she fell short again...
...enthusiasm for the hard-line approach started in Chicago. Since 1996, after Mayor Richard Daley took control of the school system and appointed his budget chief, Paul Vallas, as its chief executive, the city has used standardized-test scores to help determine whether students should move to the next grade. In the year before the new approach, less than 2% of students were forced to repeat a grade; last year close to 15% of third-, sixth- and eighth-graders were retained. The city spent $24 million last year on summer programs designed to give kids one last chance to pass...
There are other hopeful signs. Northwestern University professor Fred Hess, who studies the Chicago system, has found that the policy against social promotion has instilled a new commitment to learning among those kids who scored well enough to be promoted. Indeed, opponents of social promotion argue that the simple fear of getting held back will motivate slackers to shape up, and that the number of retainees will accordingly dwindle. "We're not out to flunk kids," says school-board president Gery Chico. "We're out to improve kids...
...promoted to the next grade hardly guarantees that they're getting a better education. Because many teachers feel compelled to "teach to the test," students may learn to pass the gateway exam but be left without the skills needed to progress much further. At Doolittle East in Chicago, Alfred Rembert taught a sixth-grade class this year in which all the students were repeating the grade. Half of them were promoted in January. Rembert spent most of this semester preparing the remainder for a fourth try on the Iowas. "All this focus on reading and math for the test means...
...among their new, younger set of peers. Karl Alexander, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, studied 800 Baltimore students and found that repeating a year benefited some at-risk students. Yet those retainees "were still just hanging on or barely passing" after they finally advanced. Even the extra assistance Chicago provides its retained students may not be enough. In the early 1980s, after a similar clampdown on social promotion, New York City hired 1,100 new teachers and put all retained kids in classes of 18 or fewer. But the students' scores gained no more than those of comparable...