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Social promotion is the practice of promoting schoolchildren to the next grade, to keep them with their peers, regardless of whether they are capable of doing grade-level work. Some advocates of social promotion argue that keeping children together by age (together with their age cohort) is an intrinsically important factor, and that being "kept back" would be inexcusably painful for a child emotionally. Critics argue that this is done so as not to harm the students' self-esteem, to let children stay with their friends, and to allow teachers to get rid of problem students.

However, studies have shown that the older teenager that is being "kept back" is more affected emotionally rather than a young child because older teenagers are more vulnerable to change rather than a young child. They are experiencing a lot of pressure that a young child doesn't have to face yet i.e. transition from adolescence to adulthood. Therefore, retention is much more helpful to children in the elementary and middle school level but not in the high school level.

Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education and can hide teacher ineptitude. Most children who are behind will probably end up staying an extra year in high school which clearly defeats the purpose of keeping them with their peers.

Positive results of retention

Supporters of retention have maintained that it sends a message to all schoolchildren that weak effort and poor performance will not be tolerated. In this case, it teaches underachievers to get serious and get ready for the next grade.

Negative impacts of social promotion

They cannot do the work
Sends the message to all schoolchildren that they can get by without working hard
Forces teachers to deal with under-prepared schoolchildren while trying to teach the prepared
Gives parents a false sense of their children's progress

External links

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-'''Social promotion''' is the practice of promoting [[child|schoolchildren]] to the next [[grade]], to keep them with their peers, even though they are not capable of doing grade-level work.  Social promotion keeps children together by age (together with their [[age cohort]]), and thus with the friends; it also keeps older children out of classes where they are physically larger and stronger than most of the others.  The alternative to social promotion is a policy of '''retention''', where students repeat a grade when they are judged to be a low performer.
+'''Social promotion''' is the practice of promoting [[child|schoolchildren]] to the next [[grade]], to keep them with their peers, regardless of whether they are capable of doing grade-level work.  Some advocates of social promotion argue that keeping children together by age (together with their [[age cohort]]) is an intrinsically important factor, and that being "kept back" would be inexcusably painful for a child emotionally.  Critics argue that this is done so as not to harm the students' [[self-esteem]], to let children stay with their friends, and to allow teachers to get rid of problem students.
+However, studies have shown that the older teenager that is being "kept back" is more affected emotionally rather than a young child because older teenagers are more vulnerable to change rather than a young child.  They are experiencing a lot of pressure that a young child doesn't have to face yet i.e. transition from adolescence to adulthood.  Therefore, retention is much more helpful to children in the elementary and middle school level but not in the high school level.
-Nationally, no statistics are kept on retention, but reasonable estimates based on census data suggest that in the United States, as many as one-third of all students have been retained at least once by the time they reach high school. For boys and minorities, retention is even more common. Nationally, by 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 whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, but by high school, the rate is about 15 percentage points higher for African Americans and Hispanics than for whites.
+Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education and can hide teacher ineptitude.  Most children who are behind will probably end up staying an extra year in high school which clearly defeats the purpose of keeping them with their peers.
-Retention has hard dollar costs: 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 in fact stay in the system until graduating from high school.
+==== Positive results of retention ====
-==Common arguments against and for social promotion==
+Supporters of retention have maintained that it sends a message to all schoolchildren that weak effort and poor performance will not be tolerated.  In this case, it teaches underachievers to get serious and get ready for the next grade.
-The following are common arguments - not necessarily valid - regarding this practice.
-===Arguments against social promotion===
-Critics of social promotion argue that it frustrates promoted students by placing them in grades where they cannot do the work, sends the message to all students that they can get by without working hard, forces teachers to deal with under-prepared students while trying to teach the prepared, gives parents a false sense of their children's progress, leads employers to conclude that diplomas are meaningless, and dumps poorly educated students into a society where they cannot perform.
-===Arguments for social promotion===
-Opponents of "no 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 when compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as summer school and additional tutoring, and point to summer school, additional tutoring, and 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.
+==== Negative impacts of social promotion ====
-== History ==
+* They cannot do the work
-In 1982, [[New York City]] schools stopped social promotions.  Within a few years, the problems caused by the change in policy lead the city to start social promotion again.  In 1999, the city once again eliminated social promotion; it reinstated it after the number of holdovers had mounted to 100,000 by 2004, driving up costs and leading to cutbacks in numerous programs, including those for helping underachievers.
+* Sends the message to all schoolchildren that they can get by without working hard
+* Forces teachers to deal with under-prepared schoolchildren while trying to teach the prepared
-Social promotion was ended in Chicago in 1999 at mayor [[Richard M. Daley]]'s urging, and in numerous other cities including Baltimore and Philadelphia in the 1990s.
+* Gives parents a false sense of their children's progress
-==Studies==
-In 1999, educational researcher [http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~hauser/ 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."
-Studies clearly show that early retention - 3rd grade and earlier - is harmful.  Students retained in first grade do worse than expected, both academically and emotionally. There is also substantial evidence that retention in kindergarten is equally harmful. Being removed from a group of peers with whom a student has just gotten comfortable seems to compound the difficulty of adjusting to school and to set the child back rather than help.  Among other reasons, students a young age do not "choose" to be poor learners, unlike teenagers.
-For other grades, the research is mixed. A few well-designed studies have found that retained students do better academically and feel better about themselves and about school during the first three years after retention. Consistent with the Chicago findings reported here, the biggest advantage was found in a district that identified students early, attempted to avoid retention through re-mediation, and gave special assistance to retained students. Even there, as in other studies, the advantage for retained students declined each year and washed out altogether after three years. Other studies have found that retention either offers no advantage or actually harms students. Taken together, the studies find that simple retention -- retention without efforts at prevention and special assistance for those retained -- is especially risky.
-At least 55 studies show that when flunked students are compared to socially promoted students, flunked students perform worse and drop out of school at higher rates; when other factors are controlled for, the droput rate was 70 percent more for those held back one grade.
-== References ==
-* "Schools Repeat Social Promotion Problems", Sheryl McCarthy, ''Newsday'', March 28, 2002.
-* "What If We Ended Social Promotion?", ''Education Week'', April 7, 1999, pp 64-66.
-* ''Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management'', Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, 2006
 == External links ==
 * [http://www.ed.gov/pubs/socialpromotion/intro.html Taking Responsibility for Ending Social promotion]
 * [http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/policy.htm Retention and Social Promotion]
-* [http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/atrisk/at800.htm Beyond Social Promotion and Retention—Five Strategies to Help Students Succeed
-*
 [[Category:Education issues]]