Jerry Jesness is a special education teacher in a south Texas elementary school. His email address is: jjesness@hiline.net.

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The social promotion pendulum is already beginning to swing the other way. We have seen this happen before.

First, parents, politicians and the media demand an end to social promotion. Everyone supports this tough, new stance -- at least until the first round of students fails and faces retention and/or denial of diplomas. Then a spate of student and parental complaints and threats of lawsuits begins. School business managers soon notice that retention of all failing students will leave elementary schools without sufficient staff and facilities to teach and house those students, while middle schools and high schools will face layoffs and the expense of maintaining unused classroom space.

The evils of mass retention suddenly appear to be worse than those of social promotion. The tough talkers that crusaded for the end of social promotion then begin seeking ways to weasel out.

We are in the latter phase of the social-promotion life cycle now. After examining scores on standardized tests that were to determine which students would be retained, Virginia and Arizona are considering lowering standards, and Wisconsin and Massachusetts already have done so. The Los Angeles Unified School District has backed off a plan that would have retained one-third of its students and instead will retain only about 13,500, or less than 2%. And in Texas, retention committees now will determine on a case-by-case basis whether students who fail their tests can go to the next grade.

What is social promotion?

Has social promotion in education backfired?

When I began teaching in Texas 17 years ago, schools there faced a special dilemma. State law forbade social promotion while at the same time limiting the number of times a student could be retained to once from kindergarten to third grade and once again from grades four to six. Texas eliminated the evils of both social promotion and retention by legislative fiat.

Being unable to either promote or retain students, schools placed failing students. We teachers failed to grasp the difference between promotion and placement because both resulted in the student advancing to the next grade, but our lawmakers surely understood.

Some schools districts take a "get tough" approach and mandate summer school for students who fail to pass core subjects. While it is good that students in such districts are given a second chance to learn grade-level skills, summer school is no guarantee that these skills will be mastered. Students who failed to master skills in the regular school year will not necessarily master them after 100 or so hours of review.

This is especially true of those who are several years behind in their skills. Teachers who are reputed to grade harshly are generally not offered summer-school positions, and those that fail more than a few summer scholars are rarely welcomed back. Some schools use summer school principally as a mechanism to provide an excuse to promote students to the next grade.

What's in a grade?

Promotion rules based on student grades are meaningless unless all students are held to the same standard. This is rarely the case. In fact, sometimes there are no real standards at all.

In some schools, teachers with excessive failure rates are harassed or even dismissed. In others, teachers who give failing grades are required to "prove" not only that failing grades are deserved but also that the teacher has done an adequate job of presenting the material.

It is the teacher's burden to prove that the student had an opportunity to make up missing or inadequate work, and that the teacher has re-taught material that the student failed to master. Course credit is seen as a fitting consolation prize for those who fail to learn course content. Not surprisingly, teachers in such schools are not required to prove that students with high marks deserve their passing grades.

When a standardized test is the passing standard, the temptation is great to narrow the curriculum to the content of that test. This can be seen in the way that test-preparation materials with titles like "Scoring High" or "Test Busters" come to supplement or even take the place of textbooks after a gateway test has been mandated.

Any test that is so simple that all students could be expected to fit within the 70% to 100% range is too simple to drive the curriculum of a good school. A demanding gateway test, on the other hand, is likely not to survive backlash from students and parents.

Another way

There actually are some practical reasons for allowing students to attend schools with others of their same age. Retention of all students who have not mastered grade-level skills, for example, would keep a large number of teenagers, at least a few of them drug users and/or gang members, in our elementary schools. None of us wants our 9-year-old children to study their multiplication tables along side crack-smoking Crips and Bloods, nor do we want to subject our fifth-grade daughters to the romantic advances of adolescent classmates.

The retained students would lose out as well. These older, retained elementary students would be deprived of both the presence of good peer role models and the opportunity to participate in age-appropriate extracurricular activities. In addition, stacking unsuccessful students in lower grades would place a disproportional burden on the elementary and middle schools.

A sane solution would be to retain students who have not mastered basic skills but allow them to take their classes in age-appropriate schools. All retainees older than 12 could be placed in a middle school. Those older than 15 could attend high school, and those older than 18 could attend night school or participate in some sort of work-study program. Sixteen-year-old fifth-grade retainees could study adapted fifth-grade-level material -- maybe literature at a fifth-grade reading level but with adolescent themes -- in separate classes in a high school while attending non-academic classes with mainstream students. Retained students could attempt one or two regular classes without having first met the standard for promotion, but only on a probationary basis.

The classroom teachers in such cases should have the unquestioned right to have such a student placed in remedial classes. These non-remedial teachers would not be responsible to re-teach or prove that they have attempted to "motivate" students who have not proven to have sufficient background knowledge and skills to attend regular middle- or high-school classes. Tutoring or other help could be provided outside the regular classroom.

Bear in mind that rules banning social promotion can and will be circumvented. Tests can be dumbed down; classroom teachers can be pressured to inflate grades or even to help students cheat on standardized tests; and retention committees can be pressured to accept every "extenuating circumstance" that they hear. Potential for misuse of special education and limited English-proficient labels also is great.

But the more palatable we can make retention, the more likely it is that the system will run honestly. If we honestly evaluate our students' skills and promote or retain accordingly, we avoid the worst evils of social promotion. If we allow students to attend school with others of their own age group, we avoid the worst of the evils of retention. We probably will not really end social promotion, so why not let it out of the closet?