Currently, a terrifying percentage of students arrive in high school with so few skills that they have no hope of graduating. This is due to the policy of social promotion. I have had students in high school who still count on their fingers, demand calculators for simple addition and multiplication, and even misspell their own names. In the past two years, I’ve had many students who don’t even write on the lines of their paper and don’t know the front side from the back side. The situation is becoming impossible to teach in. We must bring back retention: if they haven’t mastered the skills of the grade they’re in, they must be held back.
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Completely agree. As a former educator of two decades, the amount of children just passed on through the system is alarming. To continue to believe they will just catch up is just an opportunity to pass the buck on to the next school years educators. It does not benefit the students who need to master the instruction in order to gain any benefit from future lessons. It serves to demoralize them and lead them into a spiral of failure.