In several states across the nation, there has been successful drive to end "social promotion".
In other words, children who do not achieve the required score on a standardized test will no longer be promotion to the next grade.
Instead, they will have to repeat the grade they have finished.
Yet despite the calls for ending social promotion-many of them from politicians looking for a crowd-pleasing issue-there is little evidence that making children repeat a grade has a positive effect.
If anything, research suggests that forcing children to repeat a grade hurts rather than helps their academic performance.
In 1989, University of Georgia Professor Thomas Holmes surveyed sixty-three studies that compared the performance of kind who had repeated a grade with those who had received a social promotion.
Holmes found that most of the children who had repeated a grade had a poorer record of academic performance than the children who had been promoted despite poor test scores.
A similar study of New York City children in the 1980s revealed that the children who repeated a grade were more likely to drop out upon reaching high school.
The call to end social promotion may have a nice ring to in political speeches.
Yet there is little indication that it does students any real good.
Main idea : Across the country, many states have abolished the policy of " social promotion"