The Wire Week Four: Social Promotion

Week Four of The Wire brings the issue of social promotion front and center, as Bubbles enrolls his nephew Sherrod in middle school. Having been absent for the previous three years, and having grown up in family conditions that we can only guess at, but currently include living in an abandoned basement with his heroin addict uncle, Sherrod is understandably far behind academically, particularly in math.

But when Bubbles suggests that Sherrod should be put in a class with students at the same level of learning, assistant principal Donnelly basically says no, it's way too disruptive to put older students in a younger class, and we don't have the resources to do anything else for him. He looks like an eighth grader, he's as as old as an eighth grader, so he's an eighth grader, on the way to high school.

Social promotion has been a hot-button political issue in places like New York City, where Mayor Bloomberg and Chancelor Klein implemented policies that prevent students who don't score at a certain level on standardized reading and language tests from being promoted to the 4th grade. They subsequently added another requirement for promotion to the 6th grade, and just today announced that henceforth there will be no more social promotion to the 8th grade.

So would Sherrod be better off in New York than in Baltimore?

Probably. But it depends on more than just what grade level he's assigned. The debate over social promotion often gets framed as "Should we hold underperforming students back a grade, or not?" Opponents of Bloomberg-like policies note that holding students back screws up their self-esteem as well as the dynamics of classrooms full of younger children. Proponents argue that students who already can't handle the work in one grade will be even less likely to succeed in the next. Research is published supporting both camps; you can find one recent study based on Florida data supporting Bloomberg-like policies here.

But the real issue is this: A student who can't read at grade level is like a ball rolling downhill. The longer you let it roll, the faster downhill it goes. The paramount issue is to stop the ball from rolling.

If you can do that by holding students back a grade and giving them the extra help they need to catch up, that's a good idea. If you can do that by promoting them but then giving them the extra help they need to catch up, that's a good idea too. The important thing is giving them the extra help they need, whatever it might cost and whatever it might be. And the even more important thing is doing everything you can to prevent them from getting to that crisis point in the first place.

Socially promoting someone like Sherrod and then simply sticking him in a class taught by an ineffective, poorly-trained rookie teacher like Prez is clearly a terrible thing to do. Putting him in a class full of 5th graders probably wouldn't work much better. He needs a school system that recognizes him as the high-probability educational and social disaster that he is, and takes immediate steps to change his trajectory.

The Bloomberg proposal includes extra time on weekends and during the summer for students, as well as extra money for literacy specialists, guidance counselors, etc., in middle schools. Whether that's enough to help academically at-risk 7th graders I don't know. But it's clear that without an intense focus of attention and resources on students like Sherrod, the results will be grim.