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Thousands of Tucson-area middle and high school students who fail key subjects continue to progress through Pima County's largest school districts every year toward graduation, a 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star has found.

In the 2006-07 school year alone, nine in 10 students were moved to the next grade level, but data show that nearly a third of them failed basic courses in English, math, science or social studies. At least 94,000 students failed essential classes during the past six years.

The analysis confirms what has essentially been an open secret in education for years, what critics call social promotion, and shows it is pervasive throughout Tucson's schools.

The practice is not only causing major academic problems now, but is setting up what could be a major blow to the region's economy.

The underlying problem, experts say, is low student achievement compounded by the lack of concrete promotion policies and systemic pressure not to flunk children.

The Star's analysis found, that because grade inflation is likely occurring in Tucson-area schools, not only are thousands of children being socially promoted every year, but many other students are receiving passing grades they may not deserve.

Educators and experts differ widely on how to fix the problem. Some assail social promotion as "feel-good" education policy that rewards students who don't deserve it, while others say retention sends students into patterns of failure — making them likely to fail again or drop out.

The ramifications extend beyond the classroom. The latest records from Pima Community College show more than 4,200 local high school students failed the math portion of the school's assessment test two years ago — 79 percent of students taking the test — fueling a need for remedial college classes.

Many Tucson business leaders and experts say social promotion ultimately leads to a work force that's unprepared and has a scant grasp of skills, which bodes poorly for the region's economy and future.

"Education is the single-most important issue facing the economy," said Joe Snell, president and CEO of Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc., which promotes local economic development. "The stakes have never been greater."

One national think tank estimated more than $7 billion in annual lifetime earnings losses among nearly 28,000 Arizona dropouts last year.

Social promotion, said Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, creates a "conspiracy of mediocrity."

"The teacher doesn't make demands on the student, and the student doesn't make demands on the teacher," he said. "So life is easy for everybody, but the students don't learn."

To grasp the breadth of the problem, the Star investigation looked at students failing one, two and three or more classes.

Then the analysis examined just failures in core classes — math, English, science and social studies — to measure how well Tucson students understand key concepts.

The numbers were compared with state-generated promotion rates as well as scores from Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, or AIMS, the state's assessment test.

Among the findings:

● During the 2006-07 school year, more than 18,300 middle and high school students failed one or more core classes. For that year, that accounts for about a third of the 57,865 students in the investigation. Meanwhile, 90.5 percent of students in those schools were promoted last year.

In the six years examined, at least 94,000 students failed one core class and at least 52,000 failed two or more. The average promotion rate during that period was about 90 percent.

● Social promotion occurs more often in middle schools, setting up a much larger, and more critical, problem of students unprepared for the rigor of high school.

In the Sunnyside Unified School District, for example, there were large discrepancies between how many middle-school students failed and how many were promoted. But when those students got to Sunnyside high schools, they were retained much less frequently — and enrollment numbers plummeted.

The most current records show 395 seniors at Sunnyside High School are on track to graduate this year, though there were 750 students in the class four years ago.

● Social promotion crosses socioeconomic lines. Schools in every district, from Catalina Foothills to Vail, push students ahead more frequently than grades indicate they should.

Sunnyside and the Tucson Unified School District showed the largest disparities between the number of students who failed and who were promoted; Catalina Foothills and Sahuarita showed the smallest. Amphitheater Public Schools would not provide the data the Star requested.

● English-language learners account for little of the failure, the data suggest. In TUSD, the city's largest, fewer than 10 percent of students in ELL classes failed their respective courses, much lower than the average failure rate of all students.

Of the more than 300,000 students included in the multiyear analysis, nearly one in three failed at least one core class.

The data confirm what educators, parents and students have been aware of for years, if only by gut feeling. All acknowledge the problems it highlights: chronic low academic achievement, teacher and student indifference, and ineffective education policies.

"I think we've gotten to a point where we've buried ourselves in students who can't function on grade level," said Bob Aguilar, a teacher at Valencia Middle School, 4400 W. Irvington Road, in TUSD.

Experts say the underlying issues must be addressed in any discussion of social promotion. Those issues include academic achievement and student support, said Robert M. Hauser, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched retention rates and policy in the public-school system.

"The real issue is low achievement and what's done with the follow-up for these kids who are obviously not doing well and then go onto the next grade and fail," he said.

Administrators in Tucson-area school districts say that with the availability of student achievement scores on standardized tests, it is even more apparent — from the classroom to the superintendent's office — which student fails what class.

The crux lies in intervention once student failure is identified — but teachers say intervention is nearly impossible when basic math, reading and writing skills haven't been mastered.

"Once they hit middle school, we're only setting them up for failure," said Karriaunna Scotti, a science teacher at Valencia Middle School. "We get students who can't read. I'm not talking about English-language learners; I'm talking about students born and raised in this country."

Public schools are caught in a pattern of promotion from which they can't break free, she said. That pattern is familiar to parents who themselves failed and now are watching their children struggle.

"It was the same when I was a kid. We knew how far you had to go and you didn't have to go any further, that you were going to pass," said Manuel Cardenas, whose son attends Cholla Magnet High School. "I could remember in high school, my sister would say, 'Hey, take this teacher.' He would pass you just for showing up."

When asked about social promotion, Cardenas' son, Nicholas, 17, is frank:

"I think that it's wrong because they're getting a diploma for something they didn't really earn," he said of his classmates. "They didn't learn what they're supposed to, but they're still being pushed forward."

The phenomenon of social promotion is by no means new, but the extent of the local problem has become very clear.

A 1999 report from the U.S. Department of Education said it's hard to gauge how prevalent social promotion is.

"Some states do not collect retention information at all, and many others collect only limited data," it said. "Social promotion remains a hidden problem."

Nearly 10 years later, little has changed, said Marshall Smith, who helped draft the report as a deputy education secretary under President Clinton.

"There's different definitions of social promotion throughout the country. You don't have clear definitions," he said. "You don't have records kept. If a student is given a break by a teacher to promote them from second to third grade, let's say, there's no record that says this person is really being socially promoted."

It would be useful to track social promotion, said Lorrie Shepard, dean of the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to identify at what grade level, locally and nationally, students start to fail; what programs, if any, help them get on track; and to help guide education policy.

Politicians and policymakers, she said, typically think the solution to social promotion is retaining students and having them repeat a grade. Retention studies show it's not that simple and can be harmful for students.

Amid the current push for accountability prompted by the standards movement — which led to tests such as AIMS and the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 — social promotion and retention need to be further studied, Shepard said. Solutions tend to come in cycles with little research to support them — until key elements of fundamental problems in education, such as social promotion, are thoroughly identified and studied, the problems of the past repeat themselves, she said.

A database of social promotion would force a tough, uncomfortable question, added Hauser, the sociology professor: "Why are so many kids just doing so badly, whether it be in terms of grades or in terms of test scores and what, if anything, is being done for those kids, once it's obvious that they're not doing well?"

The community — students, parents, teachers, principals and administrators — needs to acknowledge and address social promotion, said Aguilar, the TUSD teacher. If not, a student's grade, and diploma, are worthless, he said.

"We should stop giving out the eighth-grade promotion certificate and telling parents that their children have actually met the requirements," he said. "I think that just destroys our credibility."

Ambiguous promotion policies in Tucson and across the state are at the heart of the problem.

The eight Tucson districts examined by the Star — TUSD, Sunnyside, Catalina Foothills, Flowing Wells, Marana, Tanque Verde, Vail and Sahuarita — all have policies that state a student must master the academic standards defined by the Arizona State Board of Education to be promoted to the next grade level, until high school, where the accumulation of units should prompt promotion.

The policies, drafted with help from the Arizona School Boards Association, also take into account test scores and teacher/ principal recommendations.

Yet the state board lists only the subjects students should master and otherwise leaves the definition of competency to local school boards.

"That sounds like nobody is intending to take the issue seriously at all," Hauser said. "I would say that kind of a standard is no standard at all. There's no specificity to it. It's not something that anyone would feel compelled to enforce or even think about."

The vagueness of the standards among Tucson school districts, Shepard said, leads to the inconsistencies, district by district, in failure rates, promotions and retention — a result even the chief of Tucson's largest school system acknowledged.

"Given that the state board gives the local education agency the authority to set the standards and yet in our case, we've basically said it goes back to the state standard, that's a no-win situation," said Roger Pfeuffer, TUSD superintendent.

Before TUSD implemented its current policy on student promotion and retention, catalogued as IKE, it had a much more stringent rule, known as Administrative Regulation 5110.

In place from 1987 until 2006, 5110 specifically required a 60 percent overall achievement plus minimum attendance of 85 percent of the school year. IKE, Pfeuffer explained, was put into place to comply with changes in state education standards.

Sunnyside's promotion policy, like TUSD's, is vague and thus open to interpretation, district officials there say.

"Of those students recommended for retention in eighth grade, some of them passed all their classes in ninth grade and have a C, 2.5 (grade-point) average. Some of them passed absolutely nothing at all," said N.J. Utter, a secondary curriculum and instruction specialist for the district.

Still, research "overwhelmingly tells us that retaining students does not result in more successful students down the road," said Jan Truitt, the Marana Unified School District's assistant superintendent for instructional services.

Nearly a third of all middle and high school students in that district were socially promoted last year. Officials said if students have mastered a particular subject but failed to receive a passing grade because of other variables, such as homework compliance, then the students should be promoted.

Other local education officials argued there is a place for social promotion, though many were hesitant to even use the term.

"The term 'social promotion' has a connotation that is very negative," said David Baker, a Flowing Wells associate superintendent. "There are cases where it is appropriate and needed, especially in dealing with individual students."

Tucson students are well aware of being pushed along when they probably shouldn't be and questioned whether they should have gone from eighth grade to high school and farther up the school ladder.

School diplomas lack credibility, students say, and some of their teachers' intentions are questionable. They acknowledge their individual responsibility in their education, but recognize the role adults should play as well.

Parents, for their part, are angered by the lack of responsibility shown by local educators. Many parents say they were unfamiliar with the system and didn't know how to help their children.

Anna Vasquez said her son, Marcelo, now 25, was promoted in 1997 from Hohokam Middle to Cholla Magnet High School — despite failures.

"When I got that final report card, it was all F's," said Vasquez, who works in the administrative office of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.

Concerned about Marcelo's education, she went to the school and spoke with his teachers and principal. Vasquez asked whether he'd be held back and was told he would be promoted with his classmates.

There were the same problems at Cholla, she recalled. When Vasquez asked staff members what was going on, a counselor said her son knew the material and understood the work, but he didn't want to do it.

"If he was failing and nobody bothered to have a meeting with me, his mother, or get him a tutor, if they wouldn't bother with it, why would he?" she asked.

At Cholla, more than half of students failed core classes last year, the Star investigation showed. However, about 95 percent were promoted.

Marcelo dropped out during his sophomore year at Cholla, his mother said. He simply stopped showing up to school. "Back then I didn't know who do I talk to about this, what do I do," she recalled. "I just left it."

Today, he works off and on, though nothing is steady, she said, and he only left her home a few weeks ago.

Nicholas, the current Cholla student, is failing Spanish and literature and has D's in welding and history. His only high marks are in AIMS remediation classes. Nicholas questions whether he should have graduated from Maxwell Middle School, where a disciplinary matter kept him out of school for much of his second semester.

"I had bad grades before I was suspended," he said. "I wasn't there for the last three months."

Asked why he thinks teachers pass along failing students, he is blunt: "So they don't have to deal with them again."

But what would happen if those failing students were retained?

"I don't know," he said. "We'd have a lot. Classes would be packed, probably."

In plain view of students, parents, teachers and administrators, the problem persists.

"I don't see that we're doing anything to end social promotion at all," said Aguilar, the TUSD teacher.

"We're asking kids to come in and put in more effort, to come in and do what they need to do to pass a class, but the bottom line is, if you look at a math problem and you can't even start it because you don't know what eight times seven is, how do you get beyond that?"