Retention: edspeak for flunk.

Abstract

I n response to increasing criticism— some valid, much politically motivated —public schools are changing. In recent interviews with curriculum specialists in school districts, state departments of education, and research institutions across the country (N = 38), I found the change to be rapid, often superficial, done with as much media fanfare as possible, and with little investment in thought or money. Much of the change was sparked by the unscholarly and emotional report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education: A Nation At Risk. (See this column December 1983 JLD, for a discussion of the report.) Although most of the educators to whom I spoke had read the well-researched, A Place Called School by John Goodlad (1983), they felt that his recommendations would be too expensive, too radical, and generally in opposition to the more popular and publicized A Nation At Risk. The changes I most often heard of were: (1) getting rid of (with frills ranging from foreign languages to woodshop), (2) retraining (flunking) more students, (3) instituting more classroom learning (on task behaviors) per hour, (4) demanding more homework, (5) tougher grading, and (6) trying to get as many computers as school budgets allow. In this JLD column I have discussed both grading (May 1982) and doing away with frills (June/July, 1983) and their effects on LD students. All of us at JLD encourage the intelligent integration of computers into the school curriculum. Some other time I would like to discuss active learning time and homework. But this month I have retention on my mind. Our earliest schools were ungraded. Students recited lessons individually, were passed on to harder material, and eventually graduated after the teacher or a special school examiner gave an examination which was usually oral and often individual. As the idea of free school spread, as schools were needed to reduce growing ethnic enclaves and to Americanize immigrants, and as higher branches (high schools) made their appearance in the late 1840s and demanded better groupings of entering students, grade levels replaced the old individualized passing systems. Based upon the industrial model where division of labor was seen as more efficient each group [in school] came to have its own teacher, its own room and, later, its own floor or building (Mulhern, 1959). By the beginning of this century all but the most rural schools were graded, with students moving lockstep through the grades where definite and inflexible standards determined who passed and who flunked. As enrollment in public schools increased, so did the percentage of students retained, up to 50% of the total enrollment in many districts in the beginning of this century (Thompson, 1980).