Policy in City High Schools Criticized as Social Promotion

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“Seat-time credit,” a policy that allows failing students to earn points toward passing a class just by sitting in their seats is treated as an acceptable practice in city high schools two years after Mayor Bloomberg declared the end of social promotion in lower grades.

The policy, which city Department of Education officials say is allowable under state regulations, says failing students may pass as long as they have good attendance and complete an independent project assigned by their teacher. Some teachers are criticizing the policy as veiled social promotion that allows schools to hide failure rates.

“We don’t think you should get credit for just being alive,” the United Federation of Teachers high school representative, Leo Casey, said. “It just seems to be a way for students to accumulate credits without actually doing the work.”

The Department of Education’s director of labor policy, Daniel Weisberg, says the policy has long been a fixture in the education system, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

“All kids have to demonstrate standards,” he said. “The rub here is, how does the kid demonstrate it: they go to class, they take the test, they may get the standards in all the time. Other kids may need to demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.”

Mr. Weisberg said the policy gives teachers the freedom to work with students struggling to pass conventional assessments if they can show they’ve mastered the knowledge and skills covered in the course by completing, for example, a research project. The type of alternative assessment is left to the teacher’s discretion, Mr. Weisberg said. The Department of Education does not track the number of students that pass classes using seat-time credit.

“This is good teaching practice,” Mr. Weisberg said. “If you only do one size fits all, you absolutely will lose kids who are capable of meeting the standards.”

A former director of assessment and accountability, Robert Tobias, a scholar at the Steinhardt School of Education, affirms that seat-time credit has been around for a long time, noting that standardized test advocates coined the phrase as a criticism of schools that promoted failing students in the 1970s. He said that while the policy can be used as a fair way to offer students alternatives to conventional tests, it also can be abused if there are no accountability mechanisms in place.

“It’s been used as a pejorative sense about students who just come to school, sit in a seat, may not do the work, don’t show a high standard.… Yet they get credit, they get a passing grade,” he said. “If it’s up to the teacher, and there are no standards, that is tantamount to seat-time.”


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