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It's not exclusion. If you fail to meet standards, you should be retained for another year for additional time to meet them. That only becomes a "problem" when

It's not exclusion. If you fail to meet standards, you should be retained for another year for additional time to meet them. That only becomes a "problem" when we treat it like one, usually because of warped institutional incentives or misplaced shame. We’ve built a system where the performance of teachers and schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student who doesn’t graduate on time is a failure of instruction. That’s nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma, poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later career situations that they are not prepared properly for. What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now proving this fact.

Terr_ 1y ago
> retained for another year It strikes me that US K-12 systems don't have a clear architecture to support, er, non-uniform progress. A student either moves to the next grade in all classes, or "repeats" a year. Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? Maybe in high-school the concept of "honors" classes becomes available. Perhaps that represents a conflict between the social goals (keeping cohorts together) versus per-subject educational ones.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? This works for middle and high-school students, where courses are somewhat independent. It doesn't for a third grader who can't read. They need the time to master what they haven't. Rushing that process compromises every year of education in front of them.
  - gowld 1y ago
    A third grader is in school for 9 months. Why can't they handle 1 or 2 more months per year?
- gowld 1y ago
  US had that, but equity reformers dismantled it because it highlights socio-demographic inequalities in USA. Some problems are too hard to fix, so it's necessary to destroy anything that exposes evidence of the problem.

Terr_ 1y ago

> retained for another year It strikes me that US K-12 systems don't have a clear architecture to support, er, non-uniform progress. A student either moves to the next grade in all classes, or "repeats" a year. Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? Maybe in high-school the concept of "honors" classes becomes available. Perhaps that represents a conflict between the social goals (keeping cohorts together) versus per-subject educational ones.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? This works for middle and high-school students, where courses are somewhat independent. It doesn't for a third grader who can't read. They need the time to master what they haven't. Rushing that process compromises every year of education in front of them.
- gowld 1y ago
  A third grader is in school for 9 months. Why can't they handle 1 or 2 more months per year?
gowld 1y ago
US had that, but equity reformers dismantled it because it highlights socio-demographic inequalities in USA. Some problems are too hard to fix, so it's necessary to destroy anything that exposes evidence of the problem.