Letter from an 8th Grader
Posted: July 9th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 15 Comments »
Z joined our 8th grade this year. She didn’t pass. Despite much intervention, many meetings, etc.
Y is a student who passed 8th grade this year. She was very proud. Last year she didn’t pass and repeated the grade.
I noticed in the email traffic that Y had written a letter to Z, one 8th grader to another, just cuz she felt like it.
Dear Z,
I want to write this letter to inspire you for next year. I know exactly how you feel because I also got kept back. Last year, in the last days that I had with my friends I spent sometime crying and making cards for the new 6th graders.
I didn’t go to 8th graduation last year for two reasons. First, I wasn’t graduating so I thought there was no point for me to come. I didn’t want to celebrate with others. Second, reason is because that day was my birthday.
My advice is you shouldn’t do what I did. At least come to the graduation to support close friends and cherish the big day with them. I’ve seen you work in tutorial and you’re really smart and you should show that to people, teachers, and tutors. There is nothing wrong with showing people what you’re capable of. There is a reason for everything that happens. I just believe that if you put enough effort next year you will be happier and more successful.
What kept me so positive this year at MATCH and a reason for me to work hard, was my mom. She kept telling me how upset she was and that I had to be a role model for my little sister. Your probably thinking how can I be a role model for my younger brother ZZ? It doesn’t matter that he is a little boy, showing him that doing your homework is important and making your mom happy will teach him important values right there.
My advice to you is not to give up and put effort and most importantly “do you”! Don’t focus on drama/gossiping let everything happen and if it doesn’t involve you, you have no reason to care. Take this chance of repeating, as a 2nd chance to be better and improve.
Next year, I’m going to come to YOUR graduation and when they call YOUR name you’re going to be so happy because you know that you deserved that diploma.
Good luck. Take care.
Millions of kids repeat a grade at some point. It’s never a happy moment. And new laws mean more kids will be held back.
From USA Today, via GothamSchools, Jessica Tully writes:
Ohio and North Carolina passed legislation in the past month requiring third-graders to pass a reading test before advancing to fourth grade. They join four other states — Arizona, Indiana, Oklahoma and Florida — with similar policies, said Jaryn Emhof of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Emhof said more states, including Mississippi and New Mexico, are considering similar laws.
Thoughts:
1. Research on this is mixed. One Chicago study by Melissa Roderick showed that retention hurt in Grade 3 and 6. But Brian Jacob also studied Chicago, found that retention there helped in Grade 6 but hurt in Grade 8. I like Brian and think he does good work.
Many older studies — not controlled ones — tend to describe harm. Marcus Winters recently published a strong paper showing that Grade 3 retention in Florida for kids who can’t read has, in net, helped kids.
2. Anyway, in a small school, large scale research isn’t the key determinant anyway. The team’s implementation is.
Holds true, I believe, with all sorts of decisions — class size, length of school day, approach to literacy, tracking, “advisory,” dress code, etc. There are usually inherent +/- to any education decision.
Same true of holding kids back. Can be effective if teachers and principal and sometimes counselor work hard on obvious stuff — massive parent and student communication, trying to tailor their next-year experience to be better, trying to help with September issues as they adjust to new social group.
3. Here is an idea.
Someone should make a movie targeted to students who repeat a grade. And their parents. A hopeful movie. With narratives like the one above. I’m thinking of a series of YouTube clips that would be easy for any teacher, parent, counselor, or principal to use. Many more kids will be held back in coming years. I’m just not aware of many resources to help.
I loved the message of Y’s letter and the letter itself. Thanks for printing it.
I am going to look for a way to incorporate this into my writing classes next year.
Idea number three is also a good one. Being held back or failing is always hard on kids. It is also hard as a teacher to have to tell a child he/she has failed, and frustrating to see, in spite of the pep talks many of us try to give in these instances, how rarely the “come back and try harder” message sinks in instead of the “I am stupid” or “my teacher hates me” message.
Awesome letter. How did that come across your desk?
In my experience, I feel that retention works when the student has significant skill deficits and those skills are remediated directly the second time through. Sometimes this means that the students needs a new approach. Other times, it just means extra tutoring on the same content. However, I find in math that just reteaching, say, 6th grade content a second time is generally not the answer. Usually it means going back to basics and filling in foundational gaps that formed (way) earlier in schooling.
I have seen way less success with kids who have been retained because of soft skill issues (homework performance, organization issues, attendance) that affected academic performance. Perhaps that comes from less school-wide success in supporting these areas. We are working hard this year to make improvements on how we support kids around organization, etc.
I will say that I find that standards-based grading makes the whole process of retention a lot clearer to students, parents and teachers…because it is clearer what students can and cannot do throughout the year, not just at the end of the year.
reverse-psych redshirting
I like your idea about developing more resources for kids who are retained. This is also something I think schools can start to do internally. At Roxbury Prep, an eighth grader who was retained (as a seventh grader) now serves as the mentor for two students who are repeating the seventh grade themselves. Here’s what that eighth grader’s mother said about that experience for her daughter: “She was saying that it’s good she’s able to let the kids know that it’s okay, that you have to learn from the experience and that you definitely need to work a little harder, but you can do it. And I mean, she did it. She’s doing excellent in eighth grade now, so she just gives them the support they need.” I think that type of cross-age peer mentoring can be a win-win.
Totally agree about the importance of the implementation piece. One of my favorite things that we do at Roxbury Prep is hold August “pump up meetings” with repeating students and their families (I’m sure we’re not unique in this regard). Typical agenda for the meeting:
1) Look at last year’s report card, then ceremoniously tear it up (we are “rewriting history”)
2) Student identifies mistakes that were made last year that s/he wants family/teachers to help avoid
3) Identify student from last year who repeated and really turned it around, became a positive force in the school
4) Set goals for the first few weeks of school
5) Watch motivational YouTube videos about being kept back (forthcoming?)
I think the key is that the whole thing is overwhelmingly positive and joyous.
[...] poignant post from Michael Goldstein ends with a few policy thoughts that largely support my previous [...]
I love the things that are being done at Rox Prep. I am totally going to steal the ripping up the report card. I’ve also had kids who have been retained do some mentoring, although in a much less ongoing way. I want to see if I can make it more ongoing.
One other thing that I have realized for my elementary kids is that when their class is moving on without them, I am the constant. At the end of the year when they know about the retention, they often choose to hang out with me at lunch, run errands for me etc. So I capitalize on that by bringing those kids in before school starts the next year so that they can help me set up the classroom. Then they feel like they somehow fit in more than the other kids coming up. They take on a leadership role in the room right from the beginning.
Thanks all. Enjoyed your comments.
I would write more but so far all I’ve eaten today is one of those high-end cupcakes that JBB brought in. The Red Devil kind. So I’m almost in a diabetic coma unless I get a taco right now….
“I have seen way less success with kids who have been retained because of soft skill issues (homework performance, organization issues, attendance) that affected academic performance.”
I think it’s an obscene injustice to hold back an otherwise able kid who won’t play the game.
I am also troubled by schools holding back kids for purely academic problems, since the standards are so wildly different. Absent a national standard, I think it’s a bad idea. If I knew a kid who was attending a charter school and was being held back, I’d advise him to go back to the comprehensive school. Being held back is guarantee that his skills would actually improve, and he’d lose a year. That sounds an awful lot like punishment.
Oops:
Being held back is “NO” guarantee, etc.
I’ve been working over at Boston Collegiate Charter School while in grad school, and I’ll be starting full-time teaching with them in the fall. BCCS goes 5-12, and, like MATCH, we face a lot of retention in those grades. In particular, we tend to retain about 20% of the 5th grade class each year (about 20 out of 90-100 kids) – some because they lacked the study habits or missed too many assignments, but most because they lacked the skills. For a lot of these students, it becomes clear that they are going to need to repeat the grade in early April, when third quarter comes to a close. When looking at the numbers, there’s just no mathematical way they can pass for the year.
What BCCS started doing last year was creating a special program in 4th quarter for 5h graders who we already knew were going to need to repeat. In it’s first year, this program, called PASS, was a mix of pull-out classes and special instruction for a few periods a day. This year, though, we created an entirely separate PASS program. This involved some shuffling of homerooms and students, but we created a unique PASS homeroom that had entirely different classes – Fiction Reading Skills instead of the normal Reading class, Nonfiction Reading Skills instead of normal History, Math Basic Skills instead of regular math, etc. Students also get instruction in study skills and other “soft” skills to help them be more successful in their second go-around in 5th grade.
This program involves A LOT of extra work and planning, and it’s still too new to have complete results, but so far, it’s been really successful, both with better preparing kids for repeating a grade and for ensuring that students stick around to repeat rather than withdraw and go to another school. I don’t have any numerical data (although some does exist, I believe), but of the students who were in PASS the first year, I believe almost all of them had a very successful experience repeating 5th grade (better study habits, more enthusiastic about school, better grades, etc.). For the students in this year’s program, we’ll see what happens when they actually repeat, but so far it’s been amazing to be able to work with them on the skills they actually need rather than just force more content down their throats and hope for a change.
We haven’t tried this approach in any other grade, and I’m not sure it would work well with older kids (5th graders are much easier to please than, say, angsty 8th graders), but it’s an interesting thought to look at what to do to support students before they repeat rather than (or in addition to) while they’re repeating.
Erica’s post made me think about a couple of students that I had a several years back. They were entering Edward Brooke in 6th grade. They had high first grade and beginning of second grade reading levels. Within a couple of weeks of school starting, we talked to their parents about retention. This allowed us to spend their entire first year just filling in elementary school gaps. When we gave quizzes made of MCAS questions, I started with the third grade MCAS and worked our way up throughout the year. By the end of the year, each child had made over three years of reading growth. They had become real readers, joyously going to peruse the library and stashing books in their backpacks every day. And by the end of their second time in sixth grade, they were both reading on grade level and scored in the high proficient range on the MCAS. And I don’t know if they would have had that experience if we had spent the whole first year trying to work on sixth grade material with them when they just weren’t ready for it. This was a very ad-hoc sort of way of getting at what BCCS is doing more systematically.
Cal, I liked your essay – i think it was yours – on Larry Cuban blog. Definitely no guarantees. How do you handle the related question as a teacher: when a kid doesn’t meet your standard for a passing grade, what do you do?
Erica, thanks for posting, and for your candor in the sheer effort required.
i really like the essay this student has wrote.I have also gotten kept back and it think that if someone have written me a letter like this i will be very inspired.
Cal,
“I have seen way less success with kids who have been retained because of soft skill issues (homework performance, organization issues, attendance) that affected academic performance.”
What I worry about is the kid who has not passed the course because he missed 25 days of school or because he never did any work out of class and was not ready for the work in the next grade. What would you do with that kid? Just promote? How does that help that kid. My point is that as a school, we need to do better to help the kid get passed those problems so they can master the material and move on.