Social Promotion

For the last year, Susan Lokietz has watched her 9-year-old daughter, Danielle, lag behind classmates, slipping just below the district's benchmark for average competency and bordering dangerously close to repeating the third grade. The private tutoring, parent-teacher conferences and school-sponsored help sessions have failed to bring Danielle's reading skills to grade level.

Thousands of Orange County's elementary and middle school pupils are expected to repeat a grade next school year under a new state law barring social promotion--the once-widespread practice of advancing students despite failing marks. Those students are already swelling enrollment in after-school and Saturday classes in an attempt to avoid being held back. Others have enrolled in tutorials or joined homework clubs, boning up on reading or math.

Already grappling with overcrowded classrooms and teacher shortages, Ventura County schools are struggling to comply with a new state law barring social promotion--the practice of advancing students despite failing grades. But keeping students back presents additional problems in the elementary grades, officials said. Because of the class-size reduction program, schools face financial penalties if classes from kindergarten through third grade exceed 20 students.

Summer schools across Southern California are brimming with elementary and middle schoolers whose academic work wobbles on the edge of holding them back a grade. In Orange County, more than 21,000 children considered at risk are enrolled in summer sessions that concentrate on reading, writing and math. The numbers are likely to rise.

This is Pablo's second time in the third grade. But he is not exactly repeating it. The 9-year-old is not surrounded by kids a year younger. Nor is he sitting through the same lessons that stumped him last year. Pablo spends at least four hours of every school day immersed in basic reading, writing and speaking activities: phonics drills, journal-keeping, spelling and vocabulary work. He devotes most of what's left of his six-hour day to mathematics.

The finding this week that half of the Los Angeles school district's students are not ready to move up a grade is another bucket of bad news, part of a torrent of it in the troubled district. Combine the predicted failure rate, based on district test scores, with next year's deadline to begin stopping social promotion and disaster looms. It doesn't have to be that way.