National Crisis

National Crisis

Our society is being forced to deal with uneducated, illiterate high school graduates. You may ask how is a high school graduate so ill prepared for the world. Have you ever been to a store where a young person, maybe a high school student is the sales associate and the register shuts down right before you receive your change? Did you notice the look of panic on their face because they were not sure how much change you were supposed to receive? It is because of the national crisis, social promotion that can be accredited to this dependency on everything except their educated brain’s. We as educated people must help find a way to save our children from wasting their academic careers due to social promotion. "Truly embracing the idea that all children can learn and making sure that all children do, requires that we all take responsibility for ending social promotion." (www.ed.gov) If we accept and aim to prove that all people are capable of learning life’s basic necessities we will start breaking down the wall of stupidity social promotion has built.

Social promotion, the national crisis, is the promotion of students to the next grade level without mastery of their current curriculum.(www.ncrel.org) "More than half of teachers surveyed in a recent poll stated that they had promoted unprepared students in the last school year, often because they see no alternative." (www.ed.gov) If a teacher sees no option for a student other than failing or socially promoting them, the teacher generally promotes them, because it goes over easier with in society and authority. This is essentially depleting the educational standards of our country. Standards are lowered as students are continually cheated of the material necessary to independently survive in the "real" world.

The realization that I was cheated by social promotion finally came about my senior year of high school. As far back as I can remember I have had problems with math, but I passed every year up until I met Coach Taylor. He was a nonconformist in nearly every sense of the word. He definitely did not jump on the bandwagon of socially promoting students. I learned the hard way about the true aftermath of social promotion that year. I was held accountable for things I didn't know. Therefore, I was fairly distraught to discover I wouldn't be graduating with all my friends.