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Originally Posted by Major Major
I am 30 years old, so maybe older people can chime in. When I was in school, there wasn't a constant flux in my grade between people being held back year to year. You went with your grade group essentially regardless of performance, and that was 20 years ago. High School is a different story, but I believe that it largely still is. So was there a time that you went into your school year with the legitimate threat that you would not move on to the next grade with your peers?
There are legitimate consequences from the socialization aspect of schooling to doing this, but I wouldn't be opposed to more of a 'passport' system where students have more freedom within the building itself in order to complete different mandatory and well thought out stages of education and could go on to the next stage of a particular subject area only when stamped to do so, making it less so about failure and mores about different people taking different amounts of time to complete a module. This would obviously be hard to do in Elementary.
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I was part of a passport type program when it was a prototype back in NB in the late 90's. Was an absolute clown shown. Students all over the map and frustrated as a result, teachers ready to pull their hair out, and a bunch of the gifted kids sitting their doing nothing as they worked at a rate ten times quicker than the other kids and the teachers only had time to deal with the dummies 10 modules behind. Program was called "Foundation Block" or some BS like that.
I was done all my credits by September of my grade 12 year. I honestly could have been done everything 1 complete year early if I wanted to, but there was no point. I sat there for 8 months doing nothing waiting to graduate.
NB canned that program real quick. Doesn't work for teachers or students. My mother was a teacher and took the penalty and retired two years early to get out of being part of that program.