Social Promotion Is Bad

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Failing To Pass We all stumble across that one person who we graduated with and ask ourselves, “How in the world did that person receive a High School Diploma? They failed every class we had together!” This is probably a result of a practice known as “social promotion”. Matthew Ladner, a Senior Advisor for Policy and Research at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, in an article explains to us what social promotion is and the effects it has on students and schools. Social promotion, also known as grade inflation, is the act of promoting students to the next grade without them having the skills of that grade level’s standards. While ideas supporting social promotion may be valid, in the end it is not beneficial to students throughout their school careers or later on in their lives. This has been an ongoing issue for a few decades, and is still a topic of controversy. Social promotion should not be an option to students of all grades because it prevents them from being well educated, keeps students behind in their future, can be avoided by schools with a few enhancements. Promoting students to the next grade who have failed or are not ready to move up leaves the student without knowledge. When a student fails a class or grade, they also have failed learning the material that is repeatedly said to us by administrators is “important”. While the idea of social promotion has good intentions, in reality the practice of sending a child into the next grade level when unprepared is unprofessional. In an article, Merit System Boosts Kids-More Passing Under Stricter Promotion Rule, from the New York Post, a College graduate explains, “the extra year in third grade provided me an opportunity to learn and write English and understand the concepts of math and reading.” Some may say that who cares about the elementary students, they don’t learn anything valuable and so on.

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