Word: grades
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...while the threat of flunking may light a fire under students in general, there is little evidence that the ones who serve as cautionary examples actually benefit. Just the opposite may be true. A national study of 12,000 pupils found that students retained before eighth grade are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as kids who remained with their age group. In 1989, University of Georgia professor Thomas Holmes surveyed 63 studies that compared the performance of retained students with that of similarly poorly performing kids who were promoted; in 54 cases the retained...
Requiring students to pass tests in order to be 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...
...more books, no more teachers' dirty looks. When they sing the song of summer in Philadelphia, they aren't kidding. Across much of the U.S. these days, summer school is in great demand for kids who flunk standardized tests and must either pull up their scores or repeat a grade. But summer school costs money, and with rare exceptions over the past 10 years, Philly's public schools haven...
...incubator. The practice at the time was to pump a large amount of oxygen into the incubator, something doctors have since learned to be extremely cautious about. But as a result, I lost my sight. I was sent to a state school for the blind, but I flunked first grade because Braille just didn't make any sense to me. Words were a weird concept. I remember being hit and slapped. And you act all that in. All rage is anger that is acted in, bottled in for so long that it just pops out. Helen had it harder...