Mid-Year Course Promotions: The Background

Mid-Year Course Promotions

It comes as a surprise to no one that not everyone at the same age is at the same place academically. Two unrelated eleven year old students born on the same day in the same year share the same age, but that age is only a very rough predictor of what each child knows. Whatever else their shared age could predict, we can be confident that age does not predict that those two children will have the same academic ability. Teachers and schools attempt to cope with these differences, and coping with different academic abilities is what we call differentiation. At CVCS, we are able to operationalize differentiation in a variety of ways. Students in kindergarten through grade eight can work at a pace appropriate to their individual ability and academic goals. They can also work at a curricular level appropriate to their ability.

Significant philosophical and educational issues underly this discussion of mid-year course promotions. Although I will not discuss those issues here, I need to point out that surface discussions of an issue like mid-year course promotions, which is what I am engaging in here, rely upon but have in no way worked out those underlying philosophical and educational issues. There certainly is a pragmatist approach to these issues that would approve working out the particulars and then determining the principle—our system of common law works precisely this way—and if that’s what we are doing here, we should at least examine the principles thus extracted from our decisions. But I digress.

Last year, mid-year course promotions came as late as the end of the third quarter. At that time, the practice had been to promote students to the next course when the previous course had been completed. Teachers started pointing out that what students knew when they were in the Learning Center looked different from what their learning looked like in the Online School. In some cases, very different. That discrepancy could owe to teachers’ faulty perceptions. The other, more worrisome explanation was that in someone’s haste to finish a course there was more of an emphasis on completion than learning. So we did what any responsible educator would do: we sought to verify what students claimed they knew. We learned through that process that there was an emphasis, perhaps an overemphasis, on marking lessons complete rather than on learning. The upshot of that is course promotion may not indicate student learning.

This year, we have focused on what students know and can do, especially in mathematics and language arts. Coursework in the Online School can add great value to students’ learning, of course, and students who are behind in their coursework or who are able to accelerate should be able to obtain mid-year course promotions. Because we are so focused on what students know and can do, and for a variety of other operational reasons, we moved mid-year course promotions to their eponymous place in the school calendar, January 29.

Some parents had legitimate concerns about that move. What appeared as operational obstacles last summer are now less of a problem. For example, K12 is scheduled to roll out a new math program next fall, and students who began a new math course under the old math program might have faced an inefficient transition between the two. Students who accelerated through courses could run out of curriculum in high school, but K12 has made arrangements with the University of Maryland to offer qualified seniors in any K12 school a year of university courses for the price of the books (more on that soon as details emerge).

Effective immediately, students will now be able to receive a course promotion after January 29. We will still need to validate that the student has in fact learned the material from the previous course, and that validation can come in a variety of ways. The important thing is that whatever individual plan we have for a student continues to be in the best interest of that student. Removing the deadline for course promotions should have nothing to do with that.