Goodbye to the Rubber Diploma

A Virginia school experiment raises standards--and hackles

GREENSVILLE CO. SCHOOL BOARD OFFICE, WHERE PROMOTION IS BASED ON ACHIEVEMENT. So proclaims a sign posted outside the small, red brick headquarters of the superintendent of schools for Greensville County, Va. (pop. 16,000). Inside sits Sam Owen, a folksy, pipe-smoking administrator who four years ago announced that he was fed up with handing out "rubber diplomas" to high school graduates who could barely read or write. Greensville is one of the poorest counties in Virginia, and at the time the 3,700 stu dents, 65% of them black, in its integrated school system ranked in the bottom third on national achievement tests.

Owen, 54, was born just twelve miles up the road and has been a teacher, principal and school administrator in the area for nearly 30 years. He was able to convince his four-member school board that what the system needed was promotion based on a student's performance, not automatic passing based on age. In the fall of 1973, Greensville announced that twice a year students would have to take a standardized test to determine whether they had mastered their grade's material. Thereby Greensville became one of the first school systems in the country to inaugurate a minimal competency program, which in some ways resembles U.S. school practice of 40 years ago.

The following June, on the basis of low test scores, 800 students (21% white, 79% black), compared with only 239 the previous year, were ordered to repeat their grades. What is now known as the Greensville experiment was well under way. In Owen's innovative program, students held back because of below-average performance do not sit in their old classrooms while other classmates move ahead. They are assigned to new rooms and teachers, and usually grouped with children of similar ages, while they begin a special remedial course of study that focuses on basic reading, writing and math. The system also offers as a combined incentive and consolation something called "partial promotion." A student who has partially mastered third grade work, for example, may be half-promoted to a grade called 3-4.

For those who either cannot or do not want to earn a high school diploma, Owen's system has a four-year Occupational Proficiency Training course. Students who are at least 14, and two or more grades behind in achievement, can opt for the O.P.T. program, but only after a written request from their parents. Besides receiving instruction in such crafts as masonry or mechanics, they are drilled in reading, spelling and arithmetic. They "graduate" with a certificate that details their job-related skills.

Since the experiment began, the number of students of both races held back has decreased steadily. At the end of the 1974-75 school year, 620 were held back, but that number dropped to 276 this past June. The Greensville achievement average has jumped from the 30th percentile to above the 50th percentile on national tests, though most of the improvement is in Grades 1 through 7, where past weaknesses are more easily corrected. The school dropout rate has decreased from 132 in the 1972-73 school year to 82 in the past academic year. Meanwhile, hundreds of letters have poured in from educators all over the country seeking information on the program.

But while most Greensville parents, black and white, now endorse the retention scheme, a grievance has lately surfaced: a petition by the N.A.A.C.P., inspired by the complaints of 30 black families in Greensville, asking the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to investigate the school system. Among the N.A.A.C.P. worries: that testing and promotion policies have resulted in the "re-segregation of the classrooms in the entire school system," in an increase in the dropout and hold-back rates of black students and a decrease in the number of blacks enrolled in college preparatory courses.

"If the kid can't do the work, I have no problem about holding him back," says Jack Gravely, executive secretary of the Virginia N.A.A.C.P. But, he suggests, "Maybe it's 'Keep 'em back and keep 'em back' until they accept going to shop classes or just drop out of school." Gravely is also concerned about whether the tests are true and fair measurements of black student ability.

Sam Owen, who admits that he was once a segregationist, contends that any racial imbalance in classes--including the 78% black ratio among the 220 students in the O.P.T. program--is the accidental result of a temporary "educational need." His arguments--and his program--are backed by most local blacks, including the four black principals (out of seven) in the county and the one black school board member, Garland Stith, whose son David was held back for a half-year in 1973. Stith argues that undeserved passing, not retention, damages students. "They just move them on up as a way of getting rid of them," he says of schools that practice automatic promotion.

The N.A.A.C.P. questions have yet to be answered officially. But they reflect both deep racial distrust, justified by past experience, and a general black fear that standardized tests are biased against minority students. This concern, of course, runs counter to the recently intensified U.S. desire to use tests to determine whether children, regardless of race, have learned a measurable minimum in school.

If Owen's competency program becomes popular throughout the country --as George Weber, associate director of the Washington-based, nonprofit Council for Basic Education predicts it will--further questions of racial quotas and discrimination are sure to come up. Noted the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer in a recent Greensville story: "The possible confrontation raises an interesting question of which is better: achievement-based promotion in a predominantly black school system that raises the level of learning of most students while perhaps unintentionally resegregating some classes, or a social promotion system where literacy remains sub-par but classes are racially balanced?" Sam Owen himself is sure of the answer. "This program is doing more for the black citizens of Greensville County than for the whites--there are more of them," he says.

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