Word: professor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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 students did worse once they went on to the next grade than those who had not been held back...
Most retained students never catch up to classmates who went ahead and struggle just to stay afloat 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...
...case studies from 23 states and media reports, the organization asserts that law-enforcement agencies have systematically targeted minority travelers for search--pedestrians, motorists and airline passengers--based on the belief that they are more likely than whites to commit crimes. Says David Harris, the University of Toledo law professor who wrote the A.C.L.U. study: "It affects blacks and Hispanics from every station in life and every geographic location...
...that the project's done, we hope to drop in for tea with Professor Bloom...