A 1995 poll by the public opinion research group Public Agenda showed this to be the case. It found that 90 percent of the public favored higher standards in core subjects and 68 percent favored requiring students to pass standardized national exams as conditions for moving from one grade to the next. Promotion standards are a logical, and perhaps inevitable, link to the increasing public attention on high academic standards. Several states have begun official efforts to end social promotion and require strict achievement-related promotion policies.
Retention receives plenty of government attention as well.
In a memorandum dated February 1998, President Clinton urged the Secretary of Education to work toward eliminating the policy of social promotion in the schools. However, frequently overlooked paragraphs of that White House memorandum stated that the alternative to social promotion should not be the repetition of the same curriculum with the same presentation. The Secretary of Education was urged to help school districts find alternatives by using effective prevention methods and remedial programs. Neither promoting students when they are unprepared, nor simply retaining them in the same grade is the right response to low student achievement. Both approaches presume high rates of initial failure are inevitable and acceptable.