Word: graded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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, which meant...
...shot at getting into high school in the fall. If she doesn't make it, she will go to one of the city's "transition centers"--an educational way station for kids who haven't qualified for high school but are too old to remain in a regular eighth-grade classroom...
...determination waning, Walker is close to becoming a casualty in the war on social promotion in America's public schools. The idea driving the assault--that the performance of students can be improved if schools establish standards and insist that kids meet them before moving on to the next grade--has a simple, sound-bite toughness. It appeals to parents and teachers at a time when frustration with student underachievement is boiling over. Distressing test results released this spring in states like Louisiana (where 40% of eighth-graders flunked the state's exam in math) and New York (where...
...there is one thing missing: proof that cracking down on social promotion will work. Most research shows that retaining students in the same grade rarely lifts their achievement. More often it demoralizes kids like Walker--and increases their chances of dropping out. "With respect to whether retention is a good idea," says University of Wisconsin professor Robert Hauser, who studied the issue for the National Research Council, "the answer is no or almost never...
Before the new system was implemented, grade inflation in the past three decades had resulted in the number of students receiving honors more than doubling...