In education, the advancement of a student from one grade to another or, in an ungraded class, from one instructional level to another. Promotion implies that the student has developed the skills, learned the material, and met the academic standards of the grade and is therefore academically ready to move on to the next grade; as a corollary, any student who has not fulfilled those requirements will be retained in the class until he or she does so. But no one— parents, students, or school officials—is happy about retention, so in practice, many students have been given automatic promotion, being passed on from grade to grade, regardless of performance. This is sometimes called social promotion, as based on social, rather than educational, reasons. As a result, some students have been graduated from high school even though they remained functionally illiterate, creating significant social problems because such students lack the basic skills needed to operate within society. Public recognition of that fact, not least from the highly publicized cases of sports figures who have later returned to elementary school to learn to read or adults who have sued the school system for failing to teach them to read, has led schools to focus more on the development of basic skills as a basis for promotion. Sometimes a student may be given probationary promotion] if he or she is able to satisfactorily handle the work in the higher grade, the promotion will be considered permanent. Since students have variable levels of skills, some may repeat course material in one subject area while being promoted to the next level in other areas. More to the point should be an examination of why and how the student failed and especially whether the student has any undiagnosed handicaps, such as learning disabilities or ear and hearing problems, that prevented learning.