NEW YORK TIMES
By SHARON OTTERMAN
Published: September 23, 2010
The number of New York City elementary and middle school students who failed to move on to the next grade skyrocketed this school year, as weak students faced a higher bar on state tests and the broadening of the city’s tough promotion policy.
Nearly five times as many students in the third through eighth grades are being required to repeat a grade this year compared with last year, the city announced on Thursday. The weakest performance was in the eighth grade: 5,017 students, or 8 percent of all eighth graders, were held back.
Because of budget cuts, no additional money will be devoted to the 11,321 students who failed this year, the city said. Instead, the city will let teachers devote about 37 minutes each week that was intended for tutoring struggling students to developing team-based strategies for how to address the failures. One intervention specialist for every 60 schools, on average, will work with principals to develop these plans.
Matthew Mittenthal, a spokesman for the Education Department, said the city had no plans to rethink its promotion policies in light of the higher numbers and tighter finances.
“We feel very strongly that it does no one any good to promote a student who is unprepared for the next grade,” Mr. Mittenthal said. “Clearly, we have a system with a lot of work ahead.”
The city passed its promotion policy amid considerable controversy in the 2003-4 school year. Under its terms, any student who received a 1, the lowest score, on either the state math or English test must be retained, unless that student can pass a similar city version of the test after summer school. Parents can also appeal to have their child’s work reviewed.
In years when city scores on the state tests rose steadily, the number of students scoring low enough to be retained fell to less than 1 percent of the city’s third to eighth graders, or about 2,400 students last year.
But state officials judged those standards too low and raised them this summer to levels it said were meaningful as a predictor of success in college. Simultaneously, to ease the financial burden on districts, Albany relaxed requirements to provide tutoring or counseling to all students who failed the exam.
The city also decided to broaden the number of students to which its promotion policy applied. This year, for the first time, students can be held back for failing state exams in the fourth, sixth and eighth grades, as well as in the third, fifth and seventh grades.
With the higher bar, summer school proved less effective than last year in helping students. After six weeks of a half-day program, only 50 percent of students learned enough to be promoted, compared with 82 percent last year.
Attendance in summer school was poor. Less than three-quarters of third through eighth graders turned up on a typical day. For high school students, who face a different retention policy and were not included in the numbers released on Thursday, average daily attendance was 55 percent.
The city made its final promotion decisions on Aug. 27 and mailed letters to families. In a few cases — fewer than 20, the city estimated — eighth-grade students did not get the notice from their middle schools that they were being held back. So they went to the high schools to which they had been accepted before learning they had to return to middle school.
Kim Sweet, the director of Advocates for Children of New York, an educational-rights watchdog group, said her organization had received “an extraordinary number of calls” regarding eighth graders who had gotten into high schools they were optimistic about “who now have to go back to the same middle schools that failed them in the first place.” That, Ms. Sweet said, “seems like a complete recipe for failure.”
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