The Exchange Rate of a Util

For the past decade, education literature has urged parents, teachers, and administrators to avoid holding students back at all costs. The argument puts a lot of faith in confounded correlations, observing that students who are held back perform worse than students who are not held back, even when controlling for test scores at the time of the decision to hold back or not hold back. We should not be surprised that students who are held back do worse than students with similar academic records who are not held back: in the status quo, the stigma attached to being held back is damning, enough so to render a student unsuccessful for the rest of his or her life.

The literature has failed to address, to no fault of its authors, a reformation of the promotion system. In the status quo, a seemingly infinitesimal percent of students are held back. Promotion to the next grade does not signify a mastery of content and behavior standards, rather promotion serves as a reward for not upsetting the school staff as horrifically as the two or three kids who are held back. Sometimes that standard is very low, like the difference between being the student who threw chairs at classmates five times instead of the student who threw chairs at classmates six times. Being held back consequently cements a student’s identity as the worst-behaved kid in the school system, an identity that the student will likely latch onto and perpetuate in his or her future. Additionally, since the standards are so low, the only students who are actually held back tend to have psychological backgrounds in which they are already actively seeking the stigmatized identity they will earn when held back.

I do not care to endeavor to list the myriad of confounded variables that marginalize the results of literature on the subject; I care more to suggest a system, often talked about in public policy circles, in which the stigma of being held back would be removed and in which the reward for being promoted would be honestly earned. The system would have a much larger percent of students being held back, with each grade level being wholly based on academic capability. In this system, high-performing students who are often ignored in the current system because teachers are not able to differentiate their lessons to incorporate them would be able to continue on a challenging and accelerated path. Students who fail to meet academic standards would stay at their level until they met the standards. Being held back would not be seen as a threat for bad behavior, but a real consequence of not taking advantage of time at school. The stigma attached to being held back would be removed, and even more compellingly, a new positive stigma would be attached to those promoted.

My proposal sounds like what the current system is supposed to be. My emphasis is on a few changes though: first, that promotion is based on tested academic standards, not on whether or not the administration thinks you should be allowed to move on; and second, the standards for promotion would be raised so that a much higher percent of students would be held back. The seemingly simple changes could shift the paradigm of the promotion model, demanding that students earn promotion instead of asking them to avoid being held back.

The literature cannot address the above model because we cannot analyze students abstracted from the stigmas rife in the current system. A reformation in the promotion system would remove the stigmas and make for different results than we see when students are held back now. In this view, we should not buy into the misleading correlations that suggest that less students be held back; instead, we should remake the system such that more students are held back.