January/February 1999

Promotion or Retention: Which One Is Social?
By Jeannie Oakes

President Clinton and a good many other political leaders have made opposition to social promotion a cornerstone of their education initiatives. The overwhelming trend of the evidence cited in this issue of the Harvard Education Letter (see "Retention vs. Social Promotion: Schools Search for Alternatives") and elsewhere shows that grade retention has negative results for students. Rarely has social science research been so consistent about the effects of any educational practice. Arguing against social promotion may be politically popular, but retention simply doesn't work.

No sensible person advocates social promotion as it is currently being framed-simply passing incompetent students on to the next grade. Most thoughtful observers recoil not only at the educational folly of such a practice, but also at the social injustices that accrue as students of color-already disadvantaged by less than optimal schooling-disproportionately suffer from either being passed along without grade-level skills or being further disadvantaged by retention.

Masking a complex decision

Nearly all researchers and education policy analysts agree that it is best to avoid a retention/social promotion decision by giving students appropriate opportunities for learning-including qualified teachers, extra help, and additional resources. Most important, nearly everyone cautions against simplistic, formulaic choices between the poles of pass or repeat. Social promotion and retention both try to remedy problems after they've occurred, rather than preventing them or nipping them in the bud. Extra resources would be especially useful if teachers could call for them when they first notice a student's problem. Many more appropriate options get overlooked when social promotion and retention are the only policy choices.

Despite the evidence, we find ourselves immersed in a bipolar debate in which one choice-social promotion-is supposedly based on soft, social factors (e.g., concerns about self-esteem or separating a student from his peer group), while the other-retention-is supposedly based on hard, objective academic criteria. From this perspective, the choice based on non-social criteria is clearly good, while the one based on a social decision is clearly bad. Yet, when we look closely, we find that when students don't meet particular learning goals, the decision to promote or retain is always a "social decision," no matter what the outcome.

Retention is as social as "social" promotion

While most advocates do not think of retention as "social," many of the arguments in favor of retention do, in fact, have a strong social basis. Take, for example, the argument that the threat of retention will improve student (and teacher) performance. This notion is based on flawed social and psychological theories of social "pressure" rather than on anything resembling what we know about learning and motivation to learn. Further, retention advocates often rely on arguments suggesting that increased moral flabbiness and social damage will result if schools use anything other than hard, objective knowledge and skill standards to screen students into or out of the next grade.

Over the last 30 years, our society has become firmly wedded to the notion that all students can and must learn at very high levels. However, we've been less eager to advocate for the rich educational environments, well-prepared teachers, and the un-standardized practices that achieving such success requires. Retention is in some part a political attempt by policymakers, and those with the power to influence them, to accommodate this new rhetorical standard of all children learning while leaving in place powerful social norms that sustain the status quo of schooling. Retention policies allow us to perpetuate our ideology that, even if all children can learn, school (and life) success comes only to those who demonstrate their merit and competence by competing with others in a lockstep educational system. Retention also presses us to maintain our faith in standardized, norm-referenced testing as a scientific, fair, and meaningful way to judge both children's learning and their merit. We are left with an absurd combination of lofty goals and hard-nosed reality: All children may be able to learn, but only those in the specified quartiles on the test can pass.

Attacking the very real problem of low achievement with retention makes for more compelling political rhetoric than advocating more complex and costly strategies for quality education. Denigrating promotion by calling it social might do something for political campaigns, but it surely does nothing to improve schooling for the children who need it most.

Jeannie Oakes is professor of education at UCLA. Her most recent book (with Martin Lipton) is Teaching to Change the World (McGraw-Hill, 1999).