Fourth Year in Fourth Grade - Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

Yesterday I noted the recent op ed piece of Dan Brown in which he told the tale of three students being ill-served by NCLB. Today we take a further look at the research regarding the situation involving Eddie.

Eddie has attendance issues with school as well as poor test scores. The result, according to Brown, Eddie is entering his fourth year in fourth grade.

Yes his fourth year in fourth grade.

NCLB Punishes Schools for Student Failures
The No Child Left Behind Act hovers like a black cloud over the situation involving Eddie. Designed to punish those institutions that are unable to move their student populations to prescribed achievement levels, NCLB has caused schools to once again enter into the practice of retention when it comes to those students who are unable to demonstrate mastery of the appropriate grade level standards. Retention, the formal term for what the public calls “staying back,” has been popular at various times in education, even though virtually all research indicates that the practice has proven unsuccessful.

The negative impacts of retention have been noted in numerous studies. Among the findings of various researchers, retained students have higher dropout rates, increased behavior problems, greater absenteeism, and lowered self-esteem. In addition, most research has shown that kids that have been held back do not do any better academically after having been held back.

According to educational researcher Linda Darling-Hammond, the reasons for the failure of retention to improve student learning are two fold. First, retained students often receive the same instructional approach that they received the first time, an approach that didn’t work the first time through that grade. Second, most retained students begin to get discouraged with school and eventually give up on themselves as learners.

Keeping Student’s Back - Back in Vogue
Retention most often occurs in large urban school districts though some states are now utilizing the practice as well. Chicago and Baltimore, for example have been using retention for the last several years while Florida is using the practice at certain grade level thresholds. For example, in that state, students unable to pass fourth or eighth grade reading and mathematics tests are not allowed to move onto the next grade unless they attend summer school and pass another version of the same exam.

Key statistics reflect that retention is definitely back in vogue today. Studies done in 1996 by the National Center of Educational Statistics and in 1998 by the National Association of School Psychologists both revealed that one out of every six high school seniors has been retained at least once in their schooling years. For the most part, students who repeated a grade did so in kindergarten, first or second grade. However, a recent study by Boston College researchers indicated that the number of ninth graders who fail to be promoted to tenth grade has tripled since the mid-seventies.

New Solutions Needed
The question of what to do with students who fail to reach specified standards should be at the forefront of educational discussions for the next several years, especially with the provisions of the NCLB Act. The fact that many states and cities are reverting back to a practice that has proven unsuccessful in the past is particularly troubling.

Schools will ultimately need to find an answer, a new method for dealing with this issue, if they are to have any hope of responding to this educational dilemma. Finding new solutions to this long-standing problem may actually prove to be the best outcome of the NCLB Act.

Otherwise we will continue to have situations like that of Eddie, in his fourth year of fourth grade, and as Brown noted in his piece, seemingly beyond the reach of teachers, this before Eddie is more than ten years old.