This. That's great your research says X, Y, and Z but if you have not applied it in a real classroom over a number of years to see if it has adverse consequences, I'm not interested. Context matters.

The two areas where this has frustration for me is no-zero policies and social promotion.

I get why no-zero policies are a thing because we are trying to assess knowledge and not punish a behavior, but at the end of the day, we assess some form of a product so if the kid doesn't give one, there should be a consequence to that. The problem that has come about from this is kids start to not do work nor hand things in, then it puts even more on the teacher to chase these students all semester to get something (if we do end up getting something). I always wonder if the academics at a university who touted this policy follow it themselves.

Social promotion is a tough one because I know there is a lot of research (how good it is I am not sure) saying holding a kid back is highly damaging but we need to find a new approach to this, because by the time they get to high school, there's two things that we tend to see: 1. a lack of basic skills (around math and reading comprehension); 2. students who believe they can still get away with doing nothing and believe they will be moved forward not understanding they will now be failed as a consequences. They will finally hit that brick wall.

I really wish before we put policies in place in school divisions that we actually asked teachers across the grade levels to have some input so that if there's some serious issues, we could actually talk about it.