Why Bios Does Not Hold Students Back

Pamela Powell Ed. D. most probably doesn't even know who Bios Christian Academy is, but in her recent article for eJournal of Education Policy titled "A Perilous Policy Path: Grade Retention in the Age of NCLB", she does an excellent job of describing our school and in addition putting forth a good chunk of our argument for not retaining our students.

Some interesting items are provided by Dr. Powell which do not support the retaining of students. One major research supported thought is that student retention is a strong predictor of high school drop out. Students who are retained have high school drop out rates of two to eleven times greater than the rest of the population. Another study showed that retention helped 21 percent of the students who were retained and hurt 39 percent. Retention is not a very reliable method of assisting students.

Dr. Powell makes another profound case against retaining students. She writes, "When we engage in this type of thinking regarding children, we are blaming the victim." Later she adds, "Furthermore, we are usurping a year of the child's life. This equates to year of earning power, a year of life outside the institution of education, and a year of being overage in a school system."

The really exciting part of her article, her answer to retaining students, describes the educational ideas we hold dear to at Bios. The following are four of her ideas of "shifting the paradigm".
* All children develop as individuals. Children are always "ready to learn", they are always learning.
* Children would be better served through a system which meets individual needs.
* Instead of comparing children with each other, compare the child with the child.
* All children have assets.
Dr. Powell had more good ideas you can check out at the web site. But I wanted to finish with how this all applies to Bios.

At Bios Christian Academy, our main method of instruction is not based around teacher lecture. It is built on a structure of student's studying, working on projects, and/or verbally convincing their teacher their understanding of a concept. A baseline set of goals have been created for all academic subjects. From this baseline all students have individual goals monitored from their individual check sheets. There are many checks within this instructional system for teachers to be able to double student expectations or cut their goals in half. There are even provisions in each subject for students who arrive with very low skills to not use our baseline set of goals and instead the teacher creates for the student their own individual program until their skills allow them to progress at school expectations.

Another basic premise when assessing students is to observe what skills the student has instead of what the student is not able to do. For example, when told a student new to the school is a poor reader, we look at some basic skills. Can he recognize different faces? If yes, can he recognize shapes and letters? For younger students who have reading issues, we don't care if they can name letters. If the student earns a yes to the above questions and there are no physical reasons to prevent reading, then he can read. We then teach him how easy it is to read using a sight word program. After there has been success in reading in the sight word program we teach the phonics behind it. This simple method has worked on students who are not able to read from first to ninth grade 100% of the time. Then improvement in reading is a matter of time until vocabulary and comprehension are at grade level. We achieve these results consistently across all subjects and skills because of the ability to individualize each students goals. Plus from experience we know that all students can learn.

This instructional method works very well with skilled students. Many students come to us at far below their potential because of their prior instruction. Again because of our school wide baselines for each subject, students can be placed so as to plug in missing skills to allow for a greater learning pace in the future.

Also in our instructional model, the proverbial buck of student learning stops at the teacher.

We would agree with Dr. Powell, that when you retain a child you are blaming the victim. The teacher should be responsible for student learning. The present system of allowing a teacher to only spend one school year with a student allows for teachers to pass off on to the next teacher the unmet educational needs of the student. In addition, the consistency of instruction and the trust developed between the teacher and the student and parents in a multigrade instructional model is invaluable for student success.

To finish, retaining a student makes little sense because: 1) It doesn't usually work in benefitting the student, 2) It is punishing the student when he should have had a better teacher, 3) Students mature at different rates, and 4) The quality of the teacher from the previous year is probably a major factor in the child's success, so again why are we punishing the victim of an educational system which fails to meet each student's needs. Retention is a poor idea that should not be used.