While no district explicitly promotes a social-promotion policy, the notion is implicitly held in many districts, according to AFT findings. Social promotion is clearly the wrong thing to do, and we oppose it. Teachers who uphold high standards can find themselves under a lot of pressure to change grades or just pass kids on. It's a disservice to everyone in the school. It's not so that parents aren't important.
Parents are just as important to adolescents as they are to smaller children.
A positive relationship with teachers also helped keep teens on the straight and narrow path, according to the report. However, students who had jobs requiring them to work 20 or more hours a week are found to be more likely to use alcohol and drugs, smoke cigarettes, engage in early sex and have emotional distress. Besides surveying 90,000 students in grades 7 through 12, the researchers also conducted interviews with more than 20,000 teens in their homes and with 18,000 parents. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health was funded by Congress in 1993 and was sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a part of the National Institutes of Health. Before participants could delve into issues focused on institutions of higher education, they were compelled to discuss problems in K-12 education.