It's a traumatic decision for everyone involved: Should a student who fails the state test required for promotion to the next grade be held back or promoted anyway?

If you bump the kid up a grade level without the necessary skills, it may set him up for failure. But if you hold him back because he's weak in one subject area, you stigmatize him, perhaps stunt him, and may end up boring him to tears exposing him to another year of the same material -- in every subject.

On balance, though, widespread social promotion of students seems the wrong thing to do.

The problem is an annual one, but may be more pronounced this year because even state officials acknowledge that their test -- the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests -- was problematic this year, and perhaps an inaccurate reflection of student achievement.

The state's third-graders must pass the reading test, while fifth- and eighth-graders must pass both reading and math.

The math tests were based on a new, harder curriculum this past year, perhaps accounting for a good portion of the initial failure rate of about 38 percent of the students.

Under the law, teams of parents, teachers and principals can decide to promote students who fail the tests.

In Richmond County, the promotion rate of those failing the CRCT was 86 percent this year -- essentially rendering the test meaningless.

Again, we realize that holding kids back is traumatic. Still, social promotion isn't such a great idea, either.

Former Washington Post columnist William Raspberry compared social promotion of underperforming students to learning skills at your place of work. If you were given a new skill to learn, and didn't learn it, your boss wouldn't just give up and let you go on. You would have to keep at it until you mastered it.

So why allow students to skate, especially on basic skills? How is that helping them?

And what does it say about the value of the skills in question?

This question is particularly vexing in a state with some of the lowest SAT scores in the nation -- and in a school district where the graduation rate hovers around 60 percent.

At some point, we need to stop treating the "three Rs" as cafeteria food -- to be picked up or left behind.

And maybe the mantra shouldn't be "No Child Left Behind." Maybe it should be "No Basic Skill Left Behind."