Making the Fourth Grade: Summer-School Results Are In
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Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to end the promotion of third-graders who don’t have basic reading and math skills to the fourth grade got a little boost yesterday: Slightly more than half of the third-graders who retook the citywide test after summer school were able to pass it the second time around.
“We’ve promoted only those kids who are able to do the work,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters at Tweed Courthouse.” No one should be happy. We still have a very long way to go. But this shows if we focus we can get things done.”
The focus was on a total of more than 9,000 students asked to attend the city’s Summer Success Academies. Nearly 10,400 third-grade students scored a Level 1 on the city tests, meaning they did badly in math or weren’t able to fully comprehend their reading material.
About 1,159 of those Level 1-tested students were granted an appeal in June based on an evaluation of their class work. It was determined that they understood the material, but were just bad test-takers. They were allowed to go onto the fourth grade. Some 587 students who were offered a spot in summer school didn’t attend and didn’t take the August tests.
For the past two months, the students attended summer school and were drilled with basic skills, test preparation, and phonics.
Some 4,100 students, or 51%, who attended the classes for 10 or more days achieved Level 2 scores or higher on the test. Overall, 41% of all third graders who failed the test in the spring managed to pass this summer. Last year, only 19% of Level 1 third grade students managed to make the grade during the summer.
While a little more than half the students succeeding may appear low in terms of a success rate, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow on education, Jay Greene, said the numbers couldn’t be parsed in a traditional way.
“It’s progress. Now Bloomberg has 51% more students who couldn’t pass the test doing so and that’s good,” Mr. Greene said. “Of course, you could also dwell on the glass being half empty, but we have to praise progress when we see it. We have evidence that these kids were learning something because now more than half of them can pass the test.”
Mr. Bloomberg has staked his mayoralty on changing the way New York was educating its public school students. He has gained control of the schools and abolished the Board of Education; he has tried to overhaul the curriculum; and most recently, he vowed to end social promotion, the practice of promoting students to the next grade with their peers regardless of whether they could do the schoolwork.
The tests are part of that effort. The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, declared partial victory.
“Hundreds more students weren’t just passed along because they got a year old, they earned it,” he told reporters. “Our job is not to hold these kids back. Our job is to educate them.”
The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, was more circumspect with her praise. She said the 51% results were not much better than those achieved in 1999 during the Giuliani administration, which spent far less money than Mayor Bloomberg on special tutoring.
Summer school was successful, she said, because there was a “return to smaller classes, a structured curriculum (rather than balanced literacy), an emphasis on preparing teachers, and a better disciplinary atmosphere. If the system had applied these strategies during the school year, particularly for at-risk students, it would have drastically reduced the overall need for summer school.”