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Six months after an Arizona Daily Star investigation showed thousands of middle and high school students across Tucson are advancing to higher grade levels every year even though they flunk core subjects, local districts are doing little to directly address the problem.

A few say they've taken the results of the social promotion analysis into consideration and Sahuarita Unified School District officials say it validated their decision to open an alternative high school this year.

Other districts still dispute the findings, although experts in education and data analysis said the methodology was solid. And still others say the problem is a systemic dilemma that they hope to tackle with efforts to remake how they educate kids altogether, from the Sunnyside Unified School District's efforts to provide laptops to students to the Tucson Unified School District's push to revamp traditional teaching methods.

Some key state lawmakers say they may tackle the problem of social promotion by considering legislation next session that would introduce high-stakes testing in earlier grades.

A team of reporters spent 10 months analyzing 3 million anonymous student grades from nine districts and found:

• In the six years examined, nearly 98,000 students — about 29 percent of the more than 342,000 students enrolled — failed at least one core class, defined as English, math, science or social studies. The average retention rate during that period was about 10 percent.

• Not only are students being promoted even when they fail essential classes, other students are receiving passing grades that they may not have earned, meaning the problems are even more widespread. This practice, called grade inflation, is most evident in middle schools, with dozens showing far more students failing parts of the AIMS tests than are failing corresponding core classes.

The findings underscore communitywide problems that cross socioeconomic lines and show up in every district examined. Many Tucson business leaders and experts say social promotion and grade inflation ultimately lead to a work force that's unprepared and has a scant grasp of skills, which bodes poorly for the region's economy and future.

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 — almost 80 percent of test-takers — creating a need for remedial college classes.

Alina Valencia, a 16-year-old sophomore at Sunnyside High School, said social promotion could be fueling some of the problems her friends experience. "A lot of my friends in middle school were always behind and getting bad grades, but they were able to just slide through anyway," she said. "Now that they're in high school, they're really having a hard time." Several of her friends didn't come back for their sophomore year, she said.

Middle school teachers, she thinks, may feel more compelled to give easier grades. In high school, she said, "they are not going to hold your hand anymore. They expect you to be more independent. Some of the students don't want to do the work to catch up. Some of them don't know how."

The analysis quantified a problem that academics have debated for decades and that gained national attention in recent years, after then-President Bill Clinton vowed in his 1999 State of the Union Address to end the practice, saying: "We do our children no favors when we allow them to pass from grade to grade without mastering the material."

Ultimately, experts consulted in the analysis said, more money won't solve the problems. And they say retaining failing students isn't the sole answer because that can cause more problems, leaving students feeling defeated and at risk of dropping out.

Iris Equihua, 15, a Catalina Magnet High School student, said she failed several classes in sixth grade, including science and math. She said it would have been "really bad" if her teachers had forced her into another round of sixth grade, because she would have let her family down and she would have been embarrassed as her friends went on without her.

Scared of how close she came to having to stay back a year, she redoubled her efforts and did better in future classes. "It changed my thinking," she said.

Still, even Equihua said retention should remain an option. "They should be held back if they aren't putting in the effort. Or if they just need a second chance at the schoolwork."

Experts say the solution rests in more rigid promotion policies, better use of standardized tests, early intervention and more accountability for teachers and administrators. An overhaul of the middle-school system also needs to be considered, they say, so students aren't set up for failure in high school.

Officials in TUSD, Tucson's largest district, say they haven't taken any direct action because of the report, though, to be fair, Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen stepped into her job a month after the analysis ran.

Marana Unified School District also has a new superintendent this year, while Sunnyside has been under new leadership since July 2007.

Fagen wants to approach a solution by changing the traditional education focus on textbook drills, memorization and uninspired lab experiments to one in which students work more deeply, with greater sophistication, in fewer areas.

Teachers are pressured to cover too much content, too fast, and in ways that don't follow research on how students retain knowledge, she said.

"A lot of the strategies we use in education produce short-term learning. Students know it well enough to pass a test, but three months later, they've forgotten it," she said.

TUSD is not embarking on any specific programs to address social promotion, she said, but is in the early stages of reshaping the district in ways that will translate into students mastering content, she said.

Perhaps the only real reaction to the analysis has come from Sahuarita officials, who used it as a way to tackle issues related to student retention and individualized instruction.

After meeting with school principals and other administrators during the summer, officials decided that developing alternative academic programs for students who are in danger of failing is the only viable option, Assistant Superintendent Manuel Valenzuela said.

The district has long offered remediation classes for students struggling to pass the state's assessment test — Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards. But it also opened an alternative high school in September for students who need more credits to graduate. The school, which has been in the planning stages for three years and has 23 students this semester, emphasizes individualized instruction and computer-based learning.

The district also expanded its summer school program to all of its schools this year, he said.

"Mindless use of social promotion is not the solution," Valenzuela said. "Neither is the lock-step movement of kids."

Brad Caryl has seen the issue firsthand for years, and he wonders why the problem still hasn't been addressed.

The 49-year-old computer-software specialist said he had to pull his son from TUSD when it became clear that he continued to advance even though he hadn't mastered the material.

Caryl recalled asking for his son to be retained in the sixth grade after finding he'd only passed one or two classes for the whole year. Appeals to the principal were to no avail — he was told retention "doesn't help."

After two charter schools and outside tutoring, his son finally caught up and just last summer eked out enough credits to graduate from high school.

Caryl suggested district officials "probably will not respond with anything until they are backed into a corner and forced to respond. If all of TUSD feels the way my son's principal did, then they really don't have a satisfactory answer for anyone."

One of the biggest critics of social promotion and grade inflation was state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne. But he sees the solutions as local ones.

"If teachers are told by the governing boards that if they hold kids back, they'll get support, then teachers will have the courage to do it," he said. "Instead, I've heard from teachers who want to hold kids back but say they are powerless to do anything about it."

Horne said retention has a place, despite the "pernicious doctrine" spread by teaching colleges that holding back kids is bad. "Those studies ignore the effect on the atmosphere in the school as a whole when kids are being promoted whether they learn anything or not."

Horne is huddling with some key lawmakers to chew on whether to tinker with adding more stringent requirements in earlier grade levels.

"If a student gets all the way to the 12th grade and fails the AIMS test, they haven't failed; we've failed them," said Sen. Pamela Gorman, a Phoenix Republican who said such a change could force schools to be aware of students' skill levels.

"If you just keep passing kids who aren't ready, the teacher the next year is left trying to figure it out and it just becomes a bigger problem each year."

Rep. Rich Crandall, the new chairman of the House Education Committee and the president of the Mesa Unified School District, said the issue of social promotion is "on the radar" but legislators will want to move cautiously.

The model that currently has the most momentum, both lawmakers say, hails from Florida, where third-graders can't move to fourth grade unless they can read. Struggling students would be able to work through the summer to catch up. In Arizona, third-graders already take the AIMS test, but it's used only for assessment. It's only a graduation requirement for high school seniors.

Crandall said there would be room for exceptions — students wouldn't be held back repeatedly in the same grade, for example, and there would be allowances made for students learning English. And, he said, some of the financial consequences would need to be worked out, because some third-grade classrooms might be more crowded as a result.

Gorman said although it needs more research, the idea makes intuitive sense to her.

"The high-stakes testing, if you will, is much more useful in the younger grades. It's better to hold them back in the formative building years of education than at the end of their formal public education," she said.

Jay Greene, an expert consulted for the first analysis because he's head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, said he wasn't surprised that most Tucson districts haven't responded to the findings.

It's politically painful to stop grade inflation and social promotion, he said. "It's an admission of failure on everyone's part — not just the school and the teacher and the principal, but to some degree, the parents and the student. That's an unpleasant feeling."

There's also the cost of another year of schooling, he said.

And finally, he said, "there's no compulsion on them to respond. There are virtually no meaningful consequences for people working in the public education system for failure."

Go to www.azstarnet.com/socialpromotion to read the stories in the original Star investigation and find online-only content, including a searchable database of area schools as well as videos of students and teachers at the heart of the issue. Also find out how to contact officials in your school district to tell them what you think.