Social promotion in Tucson
After 10 months of intensive public-records negotiating, programming, and collaborating with editors and reporters, I’m finally done with a project that examined social promotion in Tucson-area schools. The project was unique in the sense that few (if anyone?) has done this before. Social promotion, in a nutshell, is the phenomenon of pushing students to the next grade even though they don’t pass their subjects. Our team, based on a source’s tip, examined the prevalence of this in all (but one) public-school districts in the metro area. Basically, what made this project hard (among many things) was the lack of comprehensive grade data among school districts. There was almost no uniformity in data variables, and in many cases, we had to figure out what constituted core classes (English, math, etc.). I had to do a lot of cleaning up in Perl to get the data to talk to one another. The other hard part was writing queries to parse out — accurately — how many students failed one, two or three (or more) classes in each school for each year. We then compared that with the school’s official promotion rate for each grade. Wide differences indicate that students are being moved along more often than their academic progress merits. The other main component was looking at the discrepancies between scores on the state test, Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, and how often students failed English and math classes. Double-digit gaps, our experts and data show, suggests grade inflation is also occurring.
