It's sort of a "least bad" option. As in harms the least number of people. Schools are already struggling to handle incoming class sizes, they don't have the b

It's sort of a "least bad" option. As in harms the least number of people. Schools are already struggling to handle incoming class sizes, they don't have the bandwidth to increase any throughput by holding older students back. To do so would be to the detriment of those incoming students and the teachers. (There's a good short scene in the Wire that sums it up but I can't find it). The problem isn't really that students don't get held back, it's that there is no capacity in the system to handle cases where someone should be held back. Almost across the board. I went to an affluent public school in the suburbs of a major city, and their solution wasn't to hold kids back. It was to differentiate enough between accelerated and decelerated programs to where they could essentially shovel the poor performing kids into a bucket where they wouldn't bother too many teachers or other students. I don't know the ethics of that. A lot of those kids I knew wound up dead from opiates, in jail, or still at home.