I did a search for "political topics to write about" and I found https://letterpile.com/writing/Topic-List-for-Position-Essay which lists many topics. Some of the topics I don't think are political because I don't think the government should get involved in them such as "Why do so many celebrities have terrible life problems?" and "Are participation trophies in athletics a good idea?" The "Education" category has 15 topics, but it reminded me of a topic it did not list, which is "social promotion." Keeping students in the same cohort as they advance from year to year can be good (obviously there are problems like bullying and hazing), but education should be more important than students who are not academically qualified for the next grade remaining in the same grade as their friends. Would you want to be a student through high school who had friends, arrived at college, and flunked out because you were not academically prepared for it? Having had many friends in high school doesn't pay a person's salary in the real world. I am against social promotion. Students repeating grades shouldn't be common, but it shouldn't be avoided at all costs either. How do you feel about social promotion? Do you think it would be a good topic to write about? Where might I find people's opinions about social promotion in books or scholarly journals? This is not for a class.
I've never heard of an official policy of social promotion anywhere I've ever taught, but I've taught at enough places to know a first-year-in-the-system teacher would be wise to avoid recording failing semester grades very often. I don't think much of SP, and I think nothing about a student's desire to remain in a class with their friends if they don't deserve to be there. As for the bolded... if you flunked a grade, there's probably not much of a chance you're going to college anyway. I knew three people who flunked a grade, and while one did get an opportunity to begin college, he didn't finish. In a world without the cultural baggage associated with not having a degree, I'd probably support more vocational programs for those who aren't going to college. Did HS ever teach any voc-ed skills that will support a man and his family over the course of his life- is there a market for horse head bookends? I don't actually know, because I was always on a college prep track. I guess I always assumed that an employer of HS-only grads would teach the employee what s/he was supposed to do.
http://www.aera.net/Publications/Journals/Educational-Researcher/ER-Issues-and-Archives has free downloadable journal articles going back to 2001 from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The things I had to learn most different from textbooks and literature were in middle school. In seventh grade there was Home and Career Skills, which gave numeric grades even though nothing got numeric grades during the course. It included cooking and sewing. I remember a story the teacher told from 1997-1998. She said when she and her husband went to Europe her husband ate what was considered to be seven portions and she ate what was considered to be three portions. In eighth grade there was Technology, which included something that I might call the opposite of technology because it was done by hand. It included technical drawing with 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles.
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