The good and bad of retention

In the first year of Mayor Richard M. Dale/s policy banning social promotion, a third of Shoop students in the benchmark grades- 3rd, 6th and 8th- were held back. Students weren't coming to school, and thenPrincipal Lee Brown told Catalyst Chicago that too many students and their parents did not take classes and homework seriously. "I want them to be thinking about high school and college and do what they need to do so that these opportunities are there for them," she says. "I don't want a parent coming in upset because their child might not be able to go through 8th-grade graduation, telling me it might be their only graduation. It should not be their only graduation. There should be high school and then college, at least once." Shoop Principal [Lisa Moreno] talks to some students in Darrylin Ford's 5th-grade classroom. Ford was a teacher at Shoop in the late 1990s, when the promotion policy was first implemented and nearly a third of Shoop's students were held back. [Photo by Marc Monaghan]