Social promotion is the educational practice of promoting a student (usually a general education student, rather than a special education student) to the next grade at the end of a school year, regardless of whether they learned the necessary material or if they were often absent. This is done to keep the students with their peers by age, the intended social grouping. It is sometimes referred to as promotion based on seat time, or the time the child spends sitting in school. This is based on the enrollment criteria for kindergarten, which is being 4 or 5 years old (5 or 6 years old for 1st graders) at the beginning of the school year. The intention is for the students to be able to graduate from high school-level education before their 19th birthday.
Advocates of social promotion argue that promotion is done in order not to harm the students' or their classmates' self-esteem, to encourage socialization by age (together with their age cohort), to facilitate student involvement in sports teams, or to promote a student who is weak in one subject based on strength in the other areas.
In Canada and the United States, social promotion is normally limited to primary education, because comprehensive secondary education is more flexible about determining which level of students take which classes due to the graduation requirements, which makes the concept of social promotion much less meaningful. For example, a student can study with his age cohort in social studies but with younger students in math class (based on his math level assessment, summative or formative). In some countries, grade retention is allowed when students have not learned the necessary material or are often absent.
The opposite of social promotion would be to promote students once they learned the necessary material. This might be called "merit promotion", similar to the concept of a "merit civil service". The scope of the promotion might then be either to the next grade or to the next course in the same field. In a curriculum based on grades, this is usually called "mid-term promotion". In a curriculum based on courses rather than grades, the promotion is open-ended and is better understood as satisfying a prerequisite for the next course.
Supporters of social promotion policies do not defend social promotion so much as say that retention is even worse. They argue that retention is not a cost-effective response to poor performance compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as additional tutoring and summer school. They point to a wide range of research findings that show no advantage to, or even harm from, retention and the tendency for gains from retention to wash out.
Harm from grade retention cited by these critics include:
Critics of retention also note that retention has hard financial costs for school systems: requiring a student to repeat a grade is essentially to add one student for a year to the school system, assuming that the student does not drop out. Some parents worry that older retained students will victimize younger students.
Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats children of education. When socially promoted children reach higher levels of education, they may be unprepared, fail courses, and not make normal progress towards graduation.
Opponents of social promotion argue that it has the following negative impacts:
Some hold that most students at the elementary school level do not take their education seriously and, therefore, retention is most likely not to be effective. Since most middle school students value their education more, retention should be used if they are judged not to have adequate skills before entering high school.
It can also be argued that social promotion, by keeping most students at the elementary school level from advancing at their own pace, is why they do not take their education seriously. Eliminating the social promotion system would then make the incentives of merit promotion more effective at the beginning of each student's academic career.
In the United States, retention is more common for boys and non-white students than for girls and white students. By the time students reach high school, the retention rate for boys is about ten percentage points higher than for girls. In the early grades, retention rates are similar among white Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans. By high school, the rate is about 15 percentage points higher for African Americans and Hispanics than for whites.[1] Across all grades, black students are three times more likely to be grade-retained than are white students; Hispanics are twice as likely.[2] [3]
There are arguments for and against both social promotion and retention. When students are socially promoted, they may be disadvantaged by not having learned material. However, retained students are older than their peers in the classroom, which can cause social problems. African American boys are the group that is most often retained in school. By the time the students reach the ages of 15–17, 50% of African American boys are either below the grade of their peers or have dropped out of school. In contrast, only 30% of white girls ages 15–17 are below the modal grade of their peers.[4]
In 1999, educational researcher Robert Hauser said of the New York City school district: "In its plan to end social promotion, the administration appears to have [included] ... an enforcement provision—flunking kids by the carload lot—about which the great mass of evidence is strongly negative. And this policy will hurt poor and minority children most of all."[5]
In a study of 99,000 Florida students, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters [6] found that "retained students slightly outperformed socially promoted students in reading in the first year after retention, and these gains increased substantially in the second year. Results were robust across two distinct IV comparisons: an across-year approach comparing students who were essentially separated by the year they happened to have been born, and a regression discontinuity design." ["Revisiting Grade Retention: An evaluation of Florida's test-based Promotion Policy in Education and Finance Policy, MIT Press, 2006]
With the proliferation of graded schools in the middle of the 19th century, retention, as were mid-term promotions, became a common practice. In fact, a century ago, approximately half of all American students were retained at least once before the age of 13.[7]
Social promotion began to spread in the 1930s along with concerns about the psychosocial effects of retention. This trend reversed in the 1980s, as concern about slipping academic standards rose.
The practice of grade retention in the U.S. has been climbing steadily since the 1980s,[8] although local educational agencies may or may not follow this trend. For example, in 1982, New York City schools stopped social promotions. Within a few years, the problems caused by the change in policy led the city to start social promotion again. In 1999, the city once again eliminated social promotion; it reinstated it after the number of repeaters had mounted to 100,000 by 2004, driving up costs and leading to cutbacks in numerous programs, including those for helping underachievers.
Apart from the social promotion, there is the grade retention, in which students repeat a grade when judged to be a low performer. Grade retention aims to help the student learn and sharpen skills such as organization, management, study skills, literacy and academic which are very important before entering the next grade, college and the labor force.
In the US simple social promotion was not considered an adequate alternative to the grade retention. Current theories among academic scholars prefer to address underperformance problems with remedial help. Students with singular needs or disabilities require special teaching approaches, equipment, or care within or outside a regular classroom. Since students with intellectual disabilities are handled separately, schools may treat two students with identical achievements differently if one of the students is low-performing, but typically developing and the other student is low-performing due to a disability.
Apart from social promotion, there is merit promotion, either by mid-term promotion or by using a course-based curriculum with a directed acyclic graph of prerequisites similar to college curricula. This alternative is unique in allowing each student to advance at his or her own pace. It would also save school districts money by ending the practice of warehousing "talented and gifted students" and allowing those students to graduate early.