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Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

A medal seems silly, but here in this part of the US it's common to see 5th grade and 8th grade graduation ceremonies, complete with parties, fancy dresses, and gifts, for the near 100% of kids who met the minimum requirements of the lower levels of their compulsory age-based schooling.

It seems like it's even more common among people who have the least to celebrate: middle-to-upper-middle-class suburban White parents, where your kids practically can't fail school even if they try.

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Do any students fail public school grades anymore? Do students get 'held back'?

Back in the 70s, I knew students who were 'held back' - repeated 4th grade again, etc. I don't think I've heard of that since then. Obviously I'm no longer a 4th grader :) but among people I know with kids, the concept of "held back" never comes up.

No.

Even if you deserve to be 'held back', you get what's called a 'social promotion'.

In 8th grade, there was this big project we (each student) had to do in order to 'pass' 8th grade. The teachers all told us that if we didn't do it, we'd fail 8th grade, but still go on to high school as a 'social promotion'.

I actually had several friends who decided to not do that project, because nothing bad would happen to them if they didn't do it.

Those social promotions are clearly screwed up, especially as old as eighth grade. As a counterpoint anecdote, however, my mother is a kindergarten teacher who holds back (on average) two students a year for failure to understand the material or social immaturity that would prevent them from learning anything in first grade. And this is in a state (Indiana) in which kindergarten is voluntary.

Never heard of that but I don't doubt you.

In the (public) school my son goes to, people do get held back.

As someone who went through school in the 1990s-2000s, I heard of kids either in my grade or my sister's grade (younger) that had to repeat a year. I'm not sure if that's changed since, or if it was location-specific.

I graduated in 2007. While it wasn't common, there were friends of mine held back in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th grade.

Yes.

Although it sometimes takes less clear-cut forms than "you fail this course, therefore we make you repeat the entire grade." my mother, for instance, taught at a school (this was ~2000-2006) that kept students perpetually in 8th grade. The school system identified students who were likely to drop out of high school based on grades and behavior and kept them from entering high school to prevent them from depressing high school dropout rates. They would remain in 8th grade until they turned 16 and dropped out.

I was in high school in the 90's, and my classmates frequently failed and had to repeat classes. This usually didn't result in having to repeat an entire grade though, since our schedules were very personalized and classes could be repeated the next year or semester without interfering with the rest of the schedule.

This was a conversation I was having the other with a close friend from France. I was talking about how kids in the US, especially in impoverished areas, get pushed through math classes with barely passing marks even if they learned nothing. I'm not sure how completely accurate this is, but he explained that he knew many people (probably 15-20) that had repeat entire grades multiple times because they failed math.

I know that a lot more has to happen in the US in regards to financial reform of public education for kids to be able to repeat grades so liberally, but I think it would do a lot of good.

I have friends with kids who have been held back, but these are usually kids who have some form of diagnosable developmental delay, not just an average kid not doing well.

I remember kids being held back, mostly in the early k-1-2 years or 11-12th grade years. Not much in between. I was in school in the 90s and early 00s.

Don't think of graduation as an achievement. Instead, think of it as a coming-of-age celebration, like a mitzvah. From that perspective, it doesn't seem so bad.

You mean a Bar Mitzvah. A "mitzvah" is simply a commandment; the Bar Mitzvah is but one of these.

And from experience, a Bar/Bat Mitzvah is certainly an achievement, not merely a coming of age ceremony. It was certainly the hardest thing I'd done by that age (13), and involves leading a full service in hebrew and reading from the Torah, also in (very antiquated) hebrew.

Preparing for it involved tutoring for six months, in addition to biweekly hebrew and temple school classes for many years.

Thank you, that reminds me of another pet peeve of mine regarding the education system in US:

In India, where I'm originally from, even high-school was not given much importance, primary objective was getting into a good college. People dropped out for economic reasons and not other.

Here in the US by celebrating something as simple as "graduating" 5th-6th grade, we're telling these kids that they have achieved something, when they clearly have not, and then we mourn the fact that many kids dropout even before high-school.

I doubt that those early grade parties have much impact any which way.

I think they are the sort of thing that makes a certain type of parent or teacher feel good, so they end up happening when those people decide to make them happen. The kids get some cake and forget about it a week later (or maybe 2 weeks into the stress of starting at a new school).

As far as I know, the message that graduating high school is important gets hammered on over and over (and then it isn't particularly important, a GED works about as well anywhere a diploma is supposed to matter).

A high school diploma in a developed country doesn't get you that far these days.

That is because graduating from 5th and 8th grade once was an achievement, and in the scheme of human history, is remarkable. What most 5th and 8th graders have learned by the time they "graduate" would have once been more education than kings and philosophers received over the courses of their lifetimes. To put things into perspective: your average 8th grader has received more education than Newton had when he began developing calculus (though obviously, the 8th grader's education is more spread out and generalized).

It was only in the last century (post WWI) that graduating from high school became commonplace. It was not until after the GI Bill (post-WWII) that attending college became common. It was not until after Vietnam that attending college became the new normal.

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