Teacher Says Student Who Missed Over 100 Days Of School Because 'He Doesn't Feel Like Going' Will Still Be Promoted To The Next Grade
Administration is not concerned that the student is failing all of his classes.
Hryshchyshen Serhii | Shutterstock Some kids love going to school. For others, it’s a daily challenge. One student took his hatred for school to another level, missing over 100 days of eighth grade. Shockingly, he will face no consequences.
The student who missed over 100 days of school will still be promoted to the next grade.
In Reddit’s r/Teachers forum, an educator explained the difficult situation he was facing with a student. "I have an eighth grader [who] has missed 100 plus days of school because 'he doesn’t feel like going,'" he wrote. “Obviously, this means that he is failing all of his classes.”
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Despite all of this, he’s still going to make it to ninth grade. “In a couple of months, he’ll be at promotion, moving onto high school next year,” the teacher said.
While administration might have been fine with moving the kid along to the next grade, this teacher felt very differently. “It’s a disservice to this kid that we are permitting this attitude and an insult to us teachers, showing that our expectations for students really don’t matter,” he said. “Not to mention future teachers that will be forced to reteach this kid everything that he’s missed this year.”
“I’m so over social promotion,” he concluded.
Grade retention seems to have mixed effects on students.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, each state has its own rules regarding how long the school year should be. For most states, though, the school year is somewhere around 180 days. If this student missed more than 100 days, he missed well over half of the school year. It’s no wonder that he is struggling academically with how little instruction he must have received.
Yet, despite the student’s absences and low grades, and this teacher’s concerns, some believe that it is best to proceed with promoting him to the next grade as planned. Grade retention, otherwise known as holding students back, is a hotly debated issue.
Education Week staff writer Sarah Schwartz reported that student retention rates, or the rate at which students are held back, have fallen over time. This seems to be a good thing, especially seeing as grade retention disproportionately affects black students. Schwartz also cited a 2017 study that concluded that students who were held back actually experienced worse outcomes academically and emotionally, and are more likely to drop out of high school.
Some newer research, however, asserts that grade retention has some benefits. Researchers found that when retained in the third grade due to their reading level, students "had higher grade point averages and took fewer remedial courses in high school than students who had similar reading abilities but weren’t held back," Schwartz reported.
Other Reddit users agreed with the teacher, saying the whole thing was unfair.
Regardless of the impact of holding a student back in a grade, this teacher was very concerned about his student. Other teachers who commented on his post seemed to feel the same way.
“It’s because no one above you wants to deal with the consequences of him not being passed on,” one user wrote. “‘Retention doesn’t work,’” another offered, quoting what many people inside and outside of education would say in this situation. “Neither does this!”
A third commenter added, “Social promotion is one of the worst ideas of the last generation. I get it and don’t really mind if they are maybe a year, maybe two behind, but there’s a certain point when you have a teenager who can barely add and subtract, can barely read a sentence all the way through, they KNOW nothing they do matters, but they keep getting passed along.”
While studies may prove retention ineffective, the teachers who are actually on the front lines are very concerned, and their opinions shouldn’t be dismissed.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
