Torture is Illegal–the Case Against Social Promotion

If you agree that the opposite of happiness is not unhappiness, but boredom, and extreme boredom could be construed as a kind of torture, and you witness the extreme boredom in classes where students are unable to do the work set before them, and you realize they can’t do that work because they’ve been passed onto that level without the requisite skills (not because teachers don’t know how to teach, the current politically-correct explanation du jour), and you realize they have been passed on to that level without the requisite skill by those advocating social promotion, then those advocating social promotion should be tried for torture.

I’m half kidding.  Many evils are invisible when not a popular topic, and this is one of them.  Millions of students daily are being bored to intellectual death.  I’ll get to the teachers being also being bored by students who can’t do the work, then suffering the ignominy of being told it’s because they’re not delivering the material properly (see, I can use big words, I just kind of like long, borderline run-on sentences as a stylistic choice). I’ve written in my book Classroom Discipline 101 about the concept of FLOW (which I cite from the excellent book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I don’t quote often because I haven’t learned to spell his name) where we humans are in our maximum state of mind when doing a meaningful task that is neither too easy (which leads to frustration and boredom), or too difficult (which leads to frustration and boredom).

These students don’t benefit from social promotion; those who benefit from social promotion are politicians and administrators who can then cover up the fact that mounds of students in their school districts cannot do appropriate grade-level work.

The original theory behind social promotion, allegedly, is that students will catch up if they are influenced by their peers, and that it hurts their self-esteem to be held behind.  Well, those are pretty stupid reasons actually.  Sure, at times the weak link on a team can be brought up by those stronger around, but not wholesale–in other words, if most people on the team are a weak link, in other words, if not all but one or two students in a class are competent to do the work, the idea that the weaker ones will be pulled along is ludicrous.

So you get, say, a student who is at 5th grade level in math doing High School Algebra.  If you think that is a ridiculous example, you’ve never been in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  It happens there all the time and no one will dare accuse me of lying.  Oh, you will get all sorts of clouded explanations about how they are only 5th Grade Level in certain ways, that developmentally blah blah ad nauseum.  I had to take an inservice where an educator made just such a claim.  I told him if a 5th Grader can do 10th Grade level English, then we can skip levels 6 through 9 and solve the California budget crisis.  Note these educators do not have to prove what they say, they get paid by taxpayers anyway.  In short:  one definition of insanity is saying the insane is possible.  You can make A = Not A.

Now, I know empirically what really hurts self-esteem.  It is not having the wherewithal to do the work before you.  I have seen 16 year olds happily doing work in long division without thought of whether is was beneath them or not–why?  Because it was challenging to them and they were up for the challenge.

An analogy:  Put me on the tennis court with Roger Federer because I’ve been playing as long as him and should be at his level.  I guarantee my self-esteem will not go up as each ball whizzes by me unhit.  Maybe I get lucky on one and it goes back over the net, at which point a millions educators jump up and down with that ‘proof’ that I can do it.

Or put me on the court with a dozen people my age who have no skills at all, do not know how to hold the racket.  I won’t pull them up, I’ll get bored and they’ll keep me from progressing at all.

If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that my philosophy mainly comes from empirical data–what I’ve actually seen happening and what does and doesn’t work, not just blind theorizing.  So what I’m saying here about social promotion is first hand observation as well as logic.  Make sure those who disagree are accountable for their opinions and can show other results.

What this means in the classroom, is you must have work that students can do without being bored, not too difficult or too easy, for your offense to be in place discipline-wise.  My observation is that what bores students is not boring teachers so much as inability to do what is before them. Those at the level of math to send up rocket ships did not get there by having clowns and puppets dance up and down to get across concepts, but by the fascination of the subject itself, and the competence to always go to the next level.  Ah hah, there it is-you should always go to the next level, age independent, not try to skip levels and play make pretend.  Going against reality always hurts in the long run, and in this case we’re losing legions of students to this invisible classroom torture.

I know this puts teachers in a dilemma because I’ve been there:  ”Do I teach the level-appropriate work, or work the students can do?”  I’ll discuss this dilemma later.

Okay, MPT’s, I call’em as I see ‘em.  Go have fun!