The meeting of the Panel on Educational Policy set for tonight is the most important test to date of Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign for school reform. The idea that a child who fails to complete successfully a course of study should be held back to learn the required material may seem basic. This issue was brought to the fore by Herman Badillo, and Mr. Bloomberg and his chancellor, Joel Klein, face an uphill challenge before the panel.

The program unveiled by Mr. Klein is modest. Only children failing to score above “level one” in the third-grade reading and math tests were to be held back. Scoring at level one demonstrates an unambiguous lack of competence.

Pupils at that level usually can do little more than write their name at the top of the answer sheet. Children in other early childhood grades and those who fail after third grade are exempt from being held back.

Yet even this modest effort may well be given a thumbs-down this evening. Appointees of the mayor hold an 8 to 5 majority on the Panel on Education Policy, which has assumed some functions of the old Board of Education. Opposition to the initiative is being spearheaded by a mayoral appointee, Augusta Souza Kappner, president of the Bank Street College of Education. Opponents are citing a report, highly critical of the concept of holding failing children back, co-authored by Norman Fruchter of the New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy.

This is a case of a mayor being under mined by his own naiveté on educational philosophy. Bank Street College of Education is a hotbed of “progressive” educational ideology. The college boasts of its 80-year record as “a leader in child-centered education” which expects children to “construct” their own knowledge, rather than learn in a traditional teacher-directed setting. This ideology, which holds protecting the “self-esteem” of the child high above academic achievement, is at the center of what is wrong in American education today.

Mr. Fruchter was involved as a consultant to Mr. Klein as part of the Children First initiative, the creation of the blueprint that became the Bloomberg plan for school reform. Mr. Fruchter maintains that holding back students isn’t helpful to them. In January, he co-wrote an op-ed critical of department parent-involvement initiatives with, of all people, Mr. Bloomberg’s presumptive opponent next year, Fernando Ferrer.

Though the mayor and Mr. Klein are going through a learning experience, they not only need but deserve the support of the members of the panel who vote tonight.

Particularly those the mayor appointed have a responsibility not to undermine his reform at this critical juncture. The mayor would be well within his rights to replace those who challenge his reform with new appointees with a sense of loyalty not only to the mayor but to the campaign for standards that the voters asked for when they went to the polls to chose a new leader for the city.