District 518 mulls changes to retention policies at middle school

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — Of the many controversies in education, whether to retain failing students or move them to the next grade level is one of the touchiest.

District 518 is preparing to re-examine the issue with a focus on Worthington Middle School.

“In order to ensure you’re doing what’s good for kids, you have to have these discussions on topics that are confrontational and not always easily defined,” said District 518 Superintendent John Landgaard.

At the heart of the retention discussion is the ambiguity in the middle school’s retention policy, as written in its handbook.

“If a student fails 3 or more of his/her classes per quarter the student’s team of teachers will call a meeting with parents to discuss educational options,” the handbook states. “These options include, but are not limited to: Middle-Level program, BASE program, Area Learning Center, summer school and retention. Successful completion of summer school may allow a student otherwise retained to be promoted. If unsuccessful at summer school a meeting will be held to determine placement.”

At Worthington Middle School, students take six or seven classes each quarter, depending on whether they are involved in music or have a study hall.

Under the policy in the handbook, students would need to fail either 43 or 50 percent of their classes in a quarter in order for retention to become a clear possibility — but even then, the decision whether to retain a student is ultimately the parents’, not the school’s.

But the WMS Record of Proposed Interventions — a formal worksheet teaching teams fill out when considering retention or placement in the school’s Middle-Level catch-up program — lists a different policy.

“… If a student fails 9 or more of his/her core classes which include math, reading, English, science, and social studies, the team may recommend retention for the following year. Successful completion of summer school may allow a student otherwise retained to be promoted.”

The policy listed on the Record of Proposed Interventions is more lenient than the policy in the handbook, Landgaard noted, because it only counts core classes rather than electives such as band and choir.

The Record also differs in the number of classes students would need to fail and the timeframe of the failures — nine classes over a full year rather than three in a single semester.

The school board’s Instructional Committee will likely discuss the differing policies and the difficult issue of retention versus social promotion — moving kids up grade levels despite academic failure — in February. A decision is likely to be voted on by the full District 518 Board of Education at a later time, likely to be June — before the WMS handbook is printed.

Retention, social promotion and failure

Questions of fairness and success are at the heart of the retention vs. social promotion issue, and though everyone involved in education wants students to succeed, opinions differ on how best to help them.

“Both social promotion and retention set kids up not to receive a diploma, as the research will show you,” Landgaard said.

If students who fail are moved on to the next grade level, ultimately, diplomas can become devalued and seen as increasingly meaningless. In addition, students who graduate without basic skills often find themselves unprepared for society and adulthood.

Students who are not held accountable for their actions never learn to be accountable for their actions, research shows, and removing the possibility of retention may leave little incentive to succeed.

“We want that accountability piece,” said Lonnie Myrom, who teaches eighth-grade social studies at WMS.

At the same time, research has shown that retention as an educational tool is a failure.

“Retention has been found to have a negative effect on academic achievement in language arts, reading, mathematics, work-study skills, social studies, and grade point average,” wrote John Hattie in “Visible Learning,” a book dissecting more than 800 studies on achievement in education.

Students who are held back are twice as likely to drop out of school, according to “Visible Learning,” and being held back twice “almost guaranteed” students would drop out.

“If something happens here and they don’t get the skills (they need) and they fail… it’s really easy to mark time until they’re 16,” said Kathy Craun, who teaches sixth-grade science and reading at WMS.

Even students who stay in school after being retained are less likely to succeed than other students, scoring lower on academic and personal educational measures at every age level compared to students who are promoted, Hattie wrote, noting the evidence for retention is “unequivocally negative.”

Intervening for success

Both retention and social promotion have a negative impact on a student’s chances for success, but educators at WMS have many other options and strategies at their disposal before either of those last-ditch measures become necessary.

“Early success is key,” said Bjorn Bakke, who teaches seventh-grade history at WMS.

Before the possibility of retention comes up at all, teachers do recognize that a student is struggling, and because WMS teachers work in groups and discuss concerns about students and strategies for helping them, teachers will know if a student is struggling in multiple areas, said WMS Principal Jeff Luke.

Students can also get informal help from teachers after class or during directed study time.

Those types of informal intervention are done constantly across the board in every classroom as part of a teacher’s ordinary tasks.

In addition, WMS hosts parent-teacher conferences three times a year and sends out four report cards a year, plus midterms, for sixth- through eighth-grade students. Parents have access to students’ grades, attendance and behavior reports throughout the year via District 518’s online Parent Portal.

The possibility of retention only affects a handful of students, and the last time a WMS student was retained was approximately three years ago, Luke said.

Retention is rare at WMS because of all the other formal intervention options for students.

First among them is the two-year-old Middle-Level program, run by Ray Lowry, who attempts to help students catch up to their peers well enough to rejoin them in their regular classes.

The advantage of the program is that students don’t just repeat the exact same work they already failed at — they are given opportunities to learn the same material in a different environment and through different methods.

Middle-Level students do their homework during directed studies in class time rather than bringing it home, and though they attend exploratory classes with their own grades, they work on core classes with Lowry.

Last year, he had 14 students and this year, he has eight.

“They’re kids who drifted through their previous year without doing much,” Lowry said. “Last year, it was a real battle at the beginning — kids could be there or repeat the seventh grade. It took some time, but by March everything settled down.”

By then, some of the students had already joined their classmates in grade-level classes.

The Middle Level program isn’t the only option, though. Middle-schoolers may also opt for classes with the BASE program at the Area Learning Center, go to summer school or try to catch up with peers through the after-school program.

A parent’s reaction to any of those options can be extremely negative, however.

“We still run into parents that refuse summer school. (They could) start at the ALC, but we have parents that refuse that… oftentimes, our hands are tied,” Luke said. “We can say ‘yes, we’re going to retain your kid,’ and parents can say ‘no, you’re not.’”

Even students who are retained at WMS do not simply repeat the same classes with the same teachers they already failed with earlier.

“If you’re retained, that means you do something differently, with different teachers… If you go back and do it in a different way, then it works. Doing it the same way doesn’t,” Craun said. “… we kind of look at it as a last resort.”

Teachers, too, want the accountability factor of being able to retain students. Some WMS educators are glad the school board is examining the retention issue again, but cautious about where the discussion will lead.

“We’re glad the policy board is reviewing this, but we want people to know we’re helping kids,” Myrom said.

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