Houston Schools Ease Rules on High School Promotion
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO, NY TIMES, August 9, 2004

After years of toughening standards for the promotion of ninth graders, the Houston Independent School District reversed course on Thursday, saying high school students who failed core subjects could now go on to the next grade, provided they had sufficient credits from other courses.

In a unanimous vote, the board gave preliminary approval to a proposal from the Houston schools superintendent, Kaye Stripling, to restore the district's former policy of promoting students based on the number of credits they had accumulated. Ms. Stripling said that holding children back in the ninth grade, which the district had once defended as a rejection of "social promotion," served only to raise dropout rates.

"It doesn't make sense to keep a child back until he is 17 or 18 years old because he passed all his subjects except one," Dr. Stripling said in a news release. "A student sitting in the ninth grade at age 17 is a kid who is going to say, `Forget this; I'm dropping out.' And Houston can't afford to lose its children that way."

School districts around the country are grappling with the issue of social promotion. In New York City, for example, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants to hold back third graders who have not mastered basic skills. But in Chicago, the school board recently eased promotion rules as studies showed that its attempts to curtail social promotion had led to greater dropout rates and few educational benefits.

The about-face in Houston comes after a turbulent year for its schools. Last spring, the schools, which had been held up as a showcase for George W. Bush's educational accomplishments when he was the governor of Texas, were found to have vastly underreported dropout rates. While the schools had reported a 1.5 percent dropout rate to state officials, a state audit of 16 Houston schools found that nearly 54 percent of the 5,500 students who had left those schools should have been counted as dropouts, but had not been.

More recently, a Houston television station, KHOU, reported on the growing tendency since the mid-1990's for high schools to hold children back in the 9th grade, in some cases by not giving weaker students the courses they would need for promotion to 10th grade. In some instances, students were held back several times in the 9th grade, and then were suddenly promoted to the 12th grade.

To graduate, they still had to take the state test given to 10th graders, but their scores did not affect schools' ratings, on which bonuses for school employees were based.

While the Houston schools managed to avoid being downgraded after the dropout revelations, the state did require a monitor to oversee their recordkeeping. Additionally, Texas abandoned the 10th-grade assessment in favor of an 11th-grade exam required for graduation, reducing the pressure to show high scores in the 10th grade.

After the decision on Thursday, some education advocates welcomed the abandonment of a practice they had long criticized. But the shift also created bitterness, particularly among students who felt their lives had been short-circuited by the previous practice. School officials had maintained that holding children back in the ninth grade was meant to improve learning.

"Our first responsibility is to educate children," Terry Abbott, the spokesman for the Houston schools, wrote to KHOU last November. "Social promotion is harmful to students and is being abolished in Texas" and elsewhere, he wrote.

Under the policy approved Thursday, students in the Houston Independent School District must still pass the core subjects - including algebra, geometry, biology and English - but may do so at any time before graduation.

George Scott, an online education columnist for EducationNews.org, who analyzes test scores in Houston, said that he agreed with the change, but did not trust the motives of school officials. "On the one hand, H.I.S.D. gamed the system to keep kids from taking the test," Mr. Scott said. "On the other hand, they have a dropout problem, and this is another way to game the system."

Luis Vega, a 20-year-old who was held back for three years as a ninth grader at Austin High School, said he was shocked by the district's turnaround. At Austin, he said, he did poorly in a basic math course, but had been given teachers who were foreign-born, and whom he had trouble understanding.

"They should have put me with teachers who had more experience with students who were slow learners," he said. "Instead they threw us away like trash. You just learn by yourself in any way you can."

Mr. Vega now attends a charter school run by the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans, and is on track to graduate from high school this June, said Gilbert Moreno, the organization's director.