Promotion, Social

Promotion is the change in grade-level assignment at the end of the school year for a student who meets the criteria for advancement to the next highest grade level. Social promotion is the passing of students who have not mastered the academic requirements to successive grades in order to keep them with their peers. The practice of social promotion is often carried out in the interest of a student's social and psychological well-being, without regard to achievement.

Social promotion evolved as a solution to the serious problems caused by grade retention in the nineteenth century. As graded schools began replacing the oneroom schoolhouse, students were promoted on “merit,” the mastery of fixed academic requirements for each grade level. Approximately one half of the students were retained during their first eight years of school. Many times, students repeated more than one grade. Attrition of students, especially those from poor and immigrant families, was widespread. With loose compulsory attendance and child-labor laws, children, in the early twentieth century, had alternatives to staying in the education system, and ended up in manual work.

During the 1930s to 1970s, school districts adopted policies of social promotion of students by age rather than by merit, lowering the percentage of students who were overaged for their grade level or who dropped out. A consequence of compulsory attendance laws was the dilemma of what to do with students who do not make progress in schools. Low-performing students could stay with their age grouping or with their academic peers. Educators frequently chose to keep students with their same-age peers and social promoted them.

In 1999, the U.S. Department of Education, acting on the challenge from President Bill Clinton, encouraged educators to end social promotion, while at the same time ensuring that all students have the opportunity and assistance to meet academic standards. Along with the political rhetoric, public opinion strongly favors ending social promotion. Nearly 75% of parents and more than 80% of teachers and employers think it is worse to promote students to the next grade who have not mastered the basics than to retain them. Yet, there are no statistics kept on social promotion, so it is difficult to validate its widespread use. In a survey of 85 urban school districts by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), including the 40 largest in the United States, there were no districts with a policy endorsing social promotion. There are, however, indicators that it has long been a practice for dealing with lowperforming students. A national survey of teachers by the AFT indicated that a majority of them had promoted unprepared students.

The common alternative to social promotion is retention or requiring the student to remain at the same grade level in the subsequent school year. Despite decades of research findings on the negative effects of grade retention, the use of retention has gained momentum. However, most districts have vague criteria for promotion, lack uniform grading policies, and have limitations on retention (e.g., who can be retained and how often), making the practice of social promotion inevitable.

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