SACRAMENTO, CA -- For years, critics of public education have complained about the phenomenon of social promotion. Under this dysfunctional policy, students are advanced to the next grade level even though they have clearly failed to master the subject matter in their current grade. In 1998, California enacted a law to eliminate this practice, but so far the law seems to have been wholly ineffective.

According to the law, local school districts are to adopt anti-social-promotion policies that identify students who should be held back based on test results, grades, and other academic-achievement indicators. The law also says that these local policies should emphasize proficiency in reading, English language arts, and mathematics.

A key part of the law involves the method in which a failing student can avoid being held back. Under the law’s provisions, a failing student can only be advanced if the student’s teacher makes a written recommendation that retention is inappropriate. If the teacher’s recommendation is based on the student’s participation in a summer school or interim-session remediation program, then "the pupil’s academic performance shall be reassessed at the end of the remediation program, and the decision to retain or promote the pupil shall be re-evaluated at that time." It is at the latter juncture that school districts are losing their nerve.

This past summer in Oakland, 14,000 failing students were required to take summer school classes in order to avoid being held back. More than half of these students, however, failed to show up for class. When faced with the prospect of holding back thousands of children, the Oakland Unified School District duly caved.

"What do you want us to do, beat them with a stick? Put them in jail?" sputtered Interim Superintendent George Musgrave. "In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have used the word ‘mandatory,’ we should have said ‘strongly urge’." Musgrave’s back-peddling confused even the director of the summer-school program who said, "some of us thought all kids were going to be held back a grade if they didn’t pass summer school." Oakland Mayor and former California Governor Jerry Brown harshly criticized the district’s cowardice saying, "In plain English, mandatory means required, and required entails some force or consequence."

Oakland is not the only district that lost its nerve when the going got tough. The Los Angeles Unified School District, one of nation’s largest, put together a $72-million proposal to end social promotion in all grades. But when it became clear that about 350,000 students--half the 711,000 district total--would have been held back if social promotion were scrapped, Los Angeles officials abandoned the plan.

The collapse of these local anti-social-promotion efforts highlights the state law’s fundamental flaw - there are no negative consequences for failing to implement the measure. The result is frustration all around. Says Sylvester Hodges, co-chair of OaklandTask Force on the Education of African-American Students, "The District kept talking about making students accountable for their grades, but the adults aren’t being accountable by running the program smoothly."

Social promotion is a dishonest and destructive practice which separates actions from consequences and cheats students out of the self-esteem that can only come with hard work and achievement. What is needed is a new law that truly bans social promotion and establishes penalties for non-compliance. Maybe then school officials will find the courage to implement the policy.

-- Lance T. Izumi