Due to social promotion INMI gets ill-trained workers?

Like US mainland schools, Northern Marianas’ educational system produces its share of students who advance in the academic ladder through a nationally-recognized problem called social promotion.

Board of Education Chair Anthony Pellegrino acknowledged the issue as a pressing dilemma in CNMI public schools, where students with slow learning skills are permitted to march to the next grade level to make way for a fresh slate of incoming students.

“We are trying very hard to overcome this practice from continuing,” said Mr. Pellegrino.

In such cases, some students whose reading and writing abilities are comparable to those in lower years are allowed to graduate for the basic reason of preventing a bottleneck of students in public educational institutions.

Some educators have expressed concerns that this practice might lead to a significant number of young people who are being allowed to leave the school and enter the islands’ labor pool without sufficient knowledge and skills to make them competitive.

In the state of California alone, the BOE official cited, the school district allowed approximately 70,000 students to pass from one grade level to the next last year despite dubious improvements on the students’ learning aptitudes.

Existent for a number of reasons, Mr. Pellegrino explained that social promotion disallows a huge group of students from being stuck at the same time in a certain grade level, a situation that educators and students both find very difficult.

“So the education system just moves them along rather than put them up in limited facilities,” said Mr. Pellegrino.

Some educators believe a heterogeneous learning environment that mixes students ranging from the exceptionally bright, the average, and the slow begets social promotion.

A homogenous classroom, however, allows for students that stand on an equal footing to go through the education process on the pace they are expected to benefit from.

“The theory that a smart kid will help a slower or less advanced kid and blending them together doesn’t work. And there are perceptions that schools should not do homogenous grouping because that would put stigma on the kids, but the kids already know that,” said Mr. Pellegrino.

BOE has then advised PSS principals to be mindful of the unique needs of students inside classrooms, encouraging school administrators not to be afraid to bring the issue out in the open.

“There’s no law that says we can not do homogenous teaching. The only thing that you must do is tell parents that their child needs remedial help. That if he/she stays with this group he/she is going to get a social promotion, which means he will be more stigmatized later,” the BOE chair said to administrators during a PSS principals’ meeting last week.

Mr. Pellegrino added that a definite way to steer students away from the social promotion path is for parents to help them cope with school work in their respective homes.

The shortage of teachers on top of overcrowded classrooms are only two of the principal setbacks that impede students’ learning growth.

“If more parents read with their children everyday instead of yelling at them, those children who are below level standard reading will not be lagging behind. Every kid is intelligent,” he said.

The BOE official underscored that the law of learning rests on constant repetition, that students learn when facts and information are run by them more than once.

“If parents helped their kids with school work at home, we won’t have social promotions, I guarantee you,” he said.