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I was especially pleased to see this wonderful, well-researched blog on Larry Cuban's site. A teacher who told that story (and every teacher has a Jorge story) would be seen as soft or even ineffective, an excuse-maker. Clearly, the best solution is to keep both Jorge's academic growth as well as his sense of self-worth in mind--to look for a third way. But the more we standardize, measure and box up learning, the more we're driven toward believing that "social promotion" (a phrase I loathe) is what's wrong with schooling in America.

Something needs to be done about social promotion. We see students getting to high school who are surprised that they need to pass their classes to graduate and are not equipped to do so. I like the idea of novel approaches. However, I wonder if the fix of clustering students by age is the answer. Given budget cuts and class size increases, can even the best teacher really teach students who are on so many different levels? Perhaps this may be good for Jorge but what about the students who are performing at or above grade level? will they continue to be challenged?

It is not my intention to start an argument here, but social promotion is not the problem. If it were, then the answer would be easy: just flunk kids who aren't at "grade level" (whatever that means). Because then those kids will realize they need to shape up, and try harder, right? Would that it were so easy...

What's frustrating to me about Anonymous' comment is the knee-jerk negativity toward one potential solution for what to do about Jorge and kids like him. "It will never work" has been our default response to nearly all proposed improvements to seemingly intractable problems--always accompanied by chronic economic woes. Has there *ever* been a time when we could say "fortunately, our collective wealth allows us to invest in doing right by kids who come to school with fewer resources?"

Instead, we revert to whining about how expensive and futile it is to address our most grievous national problem: the huge, dangerous gap between kids like Jorge and those who are, in fact, privileged.

Anonymous--

While I'm inclined to agree that grouping students by age might not work in all cases, I also agree with Nancy that our fear of complex solutions--and our desire to keep things simple--can lead us to Pyrrhic victories.

The broader point of my posting was that different districts have settled on different strategies to meet the needs of students who are so far behind their peers that they are not ready for work at the next grade level. You're certainly right that it does children no favors if we simply push them up the ladder without any regard to their learning. On the other hand, simply failing them doesn't seem to do them much good either, though it does often give administrators impressive "tough love" credentials with the media.

Those districts that employ specific and structured strategies for helping struggling students actually address the root cause of the problem. Rather than trying remedial strategies by holding students back, they set aside specific time and resources to ACCELERATE students are behind. This website contains quite a few examples of schools or districts that have done that work to great effect.

It would be nice to see all students being grouped by age rather than grade - this would prevent the vast social issues that arise from holding a student back. Unfortunately, it would be rather troublesome to introduce this to all schools on a national level - we should just focus instead on using the school year to successfully pass the student on to the next grade. We need to improve our schools, a worry since I was trying to find the best middle schools and found it rather difficult around my area.