Promote All the Kids;
Let God Sort 'em Out

Henry J. Stern
December 12, 2003

A perennial issue in public education is 'social promotion.' That euphemism is used to describe the practice of promoting children annually to the next grade, whether or not they are able to read or write at grade level. The social aspect is that placing children with their chronological peers will lead to better socialization. Schools, however, are places for learning, and promoting children who are not capable of doing the work they will be asked to do makes it highly unlikely that they will ever get the small-group attention they would need in order to catch up with their classmates.

Former Chancellor Frank J. Macchiarola, now president of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, was Schools Chancellor from 1978 to 1983.  He was elected by the Board of Education after a political struggle between newly-elected Mayor Edward I. Koch and Albert Shanker, then the formidable president of the United Federation of Teachers. Shanker told Koch he could not have Macchiarola as chancellor, and was quite surprised when Koch produced the votes on the Board to elect him. When Macchiarola resigned in 1983, out of displeasure with a Board decision against four-year high schools, Shanker asked him to stay because he felt the Chancellor had done a very good job. 'Mac' is remembered as the only successful chancellor since school decentralization in 1970. The others fled or were fired after a couple of years.

Macchiarola instituted the Gates program at the fourth and seventh grade levels, where students would not be promoted unless they passed an achievement test covering the work of the previous grade. He also set up smaller classes where those students falling behind could be helped to learn to read and write well enough to be promoted. This cost about thirty million dollars a year. His successor, Anthony Alvarado, who was compelled to resign because he borrowed thousands of dollars from his employees, discontinued the remedial classes, and the Gates program soon fell by the wayside.

The folly of social promotion is that it puts children into classes where they cannot possibly do the required work, because they have shown they were unable to do the simpler work of the previous year. They fall further and further behind, their behavior deteriorates, and they may develop antisocial attitudes, simply because they cannot understand much of what is going on in class. Although social promotion produces favorable statistics on children advancing in school, that has nothing to do with what they actually know, which is, of course, the point of going to school. It is the equivalent of  a hospital discharging a patient before he or she is cured, so as to show the efficiency of its treatment.

When I was a little kid (and I was really little) in P.S. 152, Manhattan, we were told that if we did not do our homework on time, we could be left back, or possibly even demoted, a still worse fate. We all believed that, and it helped to get a lot more homework done, which resulted in more learning that would have taken place if there was not anxiety in the air. There must be a middle ground between what they did in the 1940's, and the policy in 2003 of giving everyone a free pass, no matter what they know or how much they work. In many schools, the idea of homework has gone out of style.

Former CUNY board chair and NYC deputy mayor Herman Badillo has listed the schools in District 7, Bronx. In one school, 1% (sic) of the pupils is (are?) reading at grade level. Other schools have single-digit percentages. The exception is a charter school (not run by the Board of Education), where 79% of the students are at grade level. Of course, the smarter kids may choose to go there, but the discrepancy remains enormous.

Mayor Koch and Badillo have seen Chancellor Joel I. Klein on this issue, and he says that he is working on the question of social promotion. But progress has been slow, and just two years remain in the mayor's term. At this point, the odds are that social promotion will survive the chancellor, just as the cockroach is likely to be around long after the human race becomes history.

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