Tragically, the current Board of Education policy does not take the individual child into account. It is driven, rather, by a need to demonstrate statistical improvement in the city's student body as a whole. It implies that the only thing that matters is how a student performs on a single test. This top-down approach gives strangers more power to assess a child's educational progress than those professionals who have worked with the student every day. No credible study has ever shown that double flunking children benefits the child.
All empirical evidence indicates double flunking is destructive to a child's self esteem.
Ultimately, the system loses because those who have double flunked tend not to finish school and therefor become a burden to society. The Board of Education's hard-line approach of double flunking its students should end. While some may be temporarily satisfied that something is being done, the long-term impact of this policy on our children and our schools will be disastrous. He said they are being assigned to small special classes and assessed for learning problems but are not automatically being designated as special education students. Independent coverage of Chicago school reform since 1989.