This is a double edged sword:

The Houston school board on Thursday abandoned a short-lived policy that had required high school students to pass core courses such as English and math before they move to the next grade.


HISD administrators hope the new high school promotion policy, which is based on accumulated credits, will keep struggling students from getting discouraged and help cut HISD's dropout rate. More than 5,000 freshmen and sophomores who would have been held back under the old policy will now be promoted.

"The ninth grade has become a bottleneck year," said Abe Saavedra, HISD's executive deputy superintendent. Forty-three percent of the district's freshmen are over age, he said. More than a third of 10th-graders have already failed at least one grade.

Is this social promotion? No says the school board

... because those students will still have to pass the classes they failed before they graduate. Instead, they said, the new promotion policy offers more flexibility and avoids branding students as failures when they fail just one class.