is school really working
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Going into our twenty-first century, we are finding more and more students graduating from high school not prepared to do college-level work or achieve sufficiently in entry-level jobs. The public business community is beginning to doubt whether or not public schools are capable of producing individuals who can become productive members of society. They ask the school systems how it is so many students can graduate with so few skills. One explanation is "social promotion"--that is, school systems' practice of promoting a student to the next grade level regardless of their academic ability.
Although social promotion may seem new to us today, it has a long history. Social promotion has been a function of educational institutions for decades. Promotion of an individual no matter what his academic success has long been a standard procedure. Schools cannot appear they are failing to educate their students so they do what ever it takes to promote the student to the next grade. The do this even if there is strong evidence against them. For example, "In Chicago alone more than 40,000 students failed standardized tests...