High Schools Are Graduating Illiterate Students. Here's How to Stop Them.
By using an old resource in a new way, we can finally eliminate social promotion.
It was one of the teachers who I worked with when I was becoming a teacher who first shared with me an ethic that many in the profession would probably affirm. “If students put in any effort,” he told me soon after I was assigned to his classroom, “I will find a way to pass them.”
During my teaching career, I repeatedly heard various rewordings of the same mantra. Department chairs, mentor teachers and other faculty routinely articulated this ethos. Before long, I adopted the same approach in my own classroom.
Any teachers reading this are probably nodding, and why wouldn’t they? Most teachers are or at least were initially inspired by their desire to help kids, so why wouldn’t they do whatever they have to do to help kids pass, if the kids are willing to at least try? And, by that token, why wouldn’t schools and school systems at least unofficially reinforce this mindset among their teaching staff?
When students get failing grades, it can adversely affect their self-esteem and further reduce their scholastic motivation, which could eventually lead them to “quit” their education entirely, either by dropping out or mentally checking out. Meanwhile, requiring them to retake classes or grades in classrooms with students whom they have progressed beyond in terms of physical growth and maturation can lead to increased classroom discipline problems and even safety issues.
Also, no teacher, school or district wants a high failure rate, or else they will be held accountable for it. Teachers will hear about it from parents, administrators and the central office. Administrators and school system officials will be taken to task by the community, school board and other federal, state and local government entities.
Aleysha Ortiz
But, ask Aleysha Ortiz, graduate of Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut and “William,” graduate of Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools in Tennessee, what they think of these rationalizations.
Ortiz announced last week that she is suing her school system, the city of Hartford and one of her special education teachers, claiming that she is functionally illiterate. Ortiz is seeking an unspecified amount in her filing.
“William,” as he is referred to in court documents, who already won a lawsuit against his school system on the same basis in 2023, also won an appeals court decision last week. The verdict confirmed the original court order that mandated Clarksville-Montgomery Schools to provide William with 888 hours of “compensatory education.” The school system says litigation is still in process.
Both William and Ortiz graduated with distinguished academic marks. Both say they managed this feat by using text-to-speech apps to complete assignments, which compensated for their poor performance on tests.
Ortiz is continuing her academic career at the University of Connecticut, which does not require prospective students to take the SAT. Ortiz, who has unsurprisingly encountered academic struggles in her first year at UConn, says that she used the same apps that she relied on in high school to complete her university application, including the admissions essay.
Ortiz’s and William’s cases follow a landmark legal action in 2017 brought by ten students against the state of California, in which the plaintiffs argued that the state’s failure to ensure that the plaintiffs could read violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. In 2020, California settled the case for $53 million.
The culprit for the experience of Ortiz, William and the California kids is “social promotion,” a decades-old, controversial practice in education that isn’t discussed much these days but evidently is still happening. It involves advancing students through school, regardless of whether they have learned what they are supposed to have learned at each grade level, in order to keep them on pace with other kids their age.
And from a classroom, school, or district-level perspective, it’s hard to criticize educators who follow this approach. Teachers, administrators and school system officials genuinely care about the students in their charge. So, we should expect that they will go the extra mile and more to get students across the finish line.
But, what happens when educators care so much that they neglect their responsibilities? What happens when teachers are so determined to make sure that kids get through school that they fail to make sure that the kids are prepared to succeed after they graduate?
Ortiz, Williams, the California kids and untold numbers of others who didn’t file lawsuits but simply slipped through the cracks and were gone. That’s what happens.
All the plaintiffs’ experiences represented systemic failures. At some point, early in their academic careers, somebody—many somebodies—needed to say “we’ve got a problem here, and it’s more important the timeline of these students being promoted to the next grade.” Somebody needed to say, unequivocally, “these kids can’t read, and the more we keep advancing them, the further they’re going to fall behind.”
Even better, school systems need to have a mechanism in place that will catch cases like Ortiz, Williams and the CA kids at the beginning of their educational careers and force schools to employ drastic interventionary measures. And, as it happens, schools have had access to this kind of mechanism for almost two centuries. They just haven’t been using it right.
Diagnostic assessment, a.k.a. standardized testing.
Standardized testing?
Many readers are suddenly having shuddering flashbacks of the hundreds of ovals that they painstakingly filled in with No. 2 pencils. The poorly-worded questions that college graduates would struggle to decipher. Watching numerous peers just fill out their answer sheets randomly or by following a repeating pattern. Hours of educational time spent on exam preparation.
Fortunately, technology has taken care of any lead and pencil-related factors, as most standardized tests are now taken on computers. But, yes, exam questions need to be redesigned. And, as for the issues of students not making serious attempts to answer test questions and teachers “teaching to the test,” these problems are the result of the tests having been used in the wrong way.
Standardized tests are administered across America, but they are primarily used to gather academic data. To the extent that students’ performance on them matters beyond that, it usually pertains to school or district funding or teacher compensation.
But, putting the onus on districts, schools and teachers is what makes teachers teach to the test. Either feeling heat from administrators or the prospect of financial incentives leads teachers to devote a substantial amount of instructional time to test-prep.
Rather than making districts, schools and teachers the most accountable parties for students’ test results, the most accountable individuals should be students themselves. Specifically, students should be required to achieve a satisfactory score on national exams that have been created for each grade level as part of their requirements to be promoted to the next grade (schools should supplement this measure with other promotion requirements that are determined at the state and district levels).
Note that the proposed policy involves the creation of new tests. These would not be your father’s standardized exams or even yours or your kids’ or their kids’. With those tests, the expectation was and now still is that there will be plenty of answers that students won’t know. The tests are designed to determine how far above or below grade level students are in various subjects.
But, the new mandatory-to-pass-school exams wouldn’t be concerned with determining whether students are above grade level, only that they are at grade level. Translation: they would be a lot easier than the standardized tests that traumatize so many folks.
Specifically, the exams would test students’ mastery of the essentials in each grade. And that’s it.
Wouldn’t this policy still probably lead to teaching to the test, as teachers would keep doing what they have to do to help students pass? Yes! And when that happens, it will achieve the ultimate goal of the policy, which is to make sure that every student in every K - 12 school in America is at least taught the basics in every subject.
The vision of this program would be fully realized after the graduation of the first classes to complete their entire education under its system. These students would have the advantage of having the new policies in place through their entire K-12 tenure. So would every class that follows.
But, what about students who are already in school when the new requirements go into effect? They should start by taking the test designed to determine promotion to their current grade. So, sixth graders would take the fifth grade summary exam and so on.
For students who are found to be behind after this initial round of testing, the emphasis should be on intense remediation, as well as reconciling them to the fact that they will now have to meet expectations through the full course of their education. This fact may be difficult to adjust to for some students who only know the culture of social promotion.
Again, the point of this initiative would not be to impose draconian learning requirements on kids. It would be, first, to make schools teach students the basics in courses across the curriculum by making it impossible for them to promote students until the students demonstrate mastery of the required material. And, second, by making students fulfill requirements in every grade, it would foster a new culture, a culture of achievement.
Portions of this post have been adapted from my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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