Bill Dooley of Kenny wrote:
"......Students should be tested at grade level when they
move into the Minneapolis school
system and should be held back or placed in the proper grade,
regardless of age, based on how they test. I gather from the article
that those who started their Minneapolis schooling in the early
grades have a significantly better chance of graduating on time."
Bill is right that kids who have spent most of their time in
Minneapolis public schools tend to do significantly better than the
kids who just moved in from Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, etc. But
whether kids should be "held back or placed in the proper grade,
regardless of age, based on how they test" is a bit more complicated
when you try put it in practice.
For example, in Minneapolis, we get kids who are 14 or
15-years old who test at about a 4th or 5th grade level. Do you
think parents want their sweet-little ten-year-olds sharing a table
or locker with a hulking, hormonally-driven 15-year-old who is four
years behind and pissed as hell that he has to be with these little
kids? (Or maybe he's thrilled to be around little kids because he has
more power. That's even worse.)
One year of being held back is not so bad. But once you hold
a kid back two or more years, things can get real creepy, real fast.
One year, in my son's third grade class, he had four new
classmates who just landed in Minneapolis. There were no school
records at all for two of them; one had seemed to have gone to
kindergarten, after that, any trail of schooling vanished. When the
four boys were tested, they couldn't even recognize letters, much
less read. They were behind most of the kids coming into
kindergarten. So we should have put them in kindergarten? Two of
these kids weighed over 80 pounds. I don't think so..........
By the end of the year, three out of the four kids were
already gone from our school. These families move around a lot, which
is one reason why their kids are so far behind. The fourth kid was
held back a year---and that seemed to help a lot academically. It
also helped that this particular kid was physically very small for
his age.
Appropriate grade levels are even a problem in private
schools, especially with boys, who are often held back one or two
years because they are socially immature. Often it's not a bad
plan....until these older boys find themselves heading into
adolescence far ahead of their classmates.
Lynnell Mickelsen
Ward 13, Linden Hills
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