Going into our twenty-first century, we are finding more and more students graduating from high school not prepared to do college-level work or achieve sufficiently in entry-level jobs. The public business community is beginning to doubt whether or not public schools are capable of producing individuals who can become productive members of society. They ask the school systems how it is so many students can graduate with so few skills. One explanation is "social promotion"--that is, school systems' practice of promoting a student to the next grade level regardless of their academic ability.

Although social promotion may seem new to us today, it ha

Few of the districts, schools, and departments provide direction specific enough to ensure consistency in grading practices; and

Policies fail to specify the criteria for determining grades and how those criteria should be applied;

Some policies refer to the need for students to meet state standards. But a recent AFT analysis of state standards revealed that only 17 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have standards in all four core disciplines--English, mathematics, social studies, and science--that are well grounded in content and clear and specific enough to be used as a common guide (AFT, 1997). When Austin and McCann (1992) surveyed 144 districts to determine grading practices, standards and procedures, they learned that:

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Approximate Word count = 502
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)