Mayor Vows to End Social Promotion Out of Fifth Grade

Mayor Bloomberg broadened his battle against social promotion yesterday by announcing he wants to require fifth graders, as well as third-graders, to pass basic skills tests be fore they can graduate.The surprise announcement was the latest in the mayor’s high-stakes gamble to revamp the school system.Mr. Bloomberg has vowed to change the way New York is educating its public school students and has made that the cornerstone of his reelection campaign.He has wrested control of the schools from the state, abolished the Board of Education, overhauled the curriculum and, in March, ended the practice of social promotion in the third grade. Now, students have to pass an exam to be promoted to fourth grade instead of simply moving along with students their own age.“It’s time to take the next step and end social promotion in the fifth grade this year,” Mr. Bloomberg told a gathering of local principals and teachers at Brooklyn Technical High School. “We will do it as carefully as we did it in the third grade – with all the same safeguards and appeals processes – as well as early interventions.”The plan, which needs approval from the mayor’s Educational Policy Panel, would affect as many as 12,500 fifth graders each year who have marginal standardized test scores but have been promoted anyway.“This can’t continue and I won’t let it,” Mr. Bloomberg told the audience in a highly scripted presentation complete with a camera-friendly backdrop and city and state flags. “We can’t solve every problem that the middle grades pose. But we can, and we will, begin to take aggressive steps to ensure that students come into the middle grades academically prepared.”To do that the mayor has allocated $20 million to fund tutors, computer based learning, and special after school, weekend, and holiday extra help sessions. The key component in the plan will be new “Saturday Academies,” which will meet for five hours on 24 Saturdays throughout the school year. The sessions won’t be mandatory, but will be recommended.Saturday Academy students will be identified using in-class assessments and test scores from previous years and will receive early, consistent supplementary instruction during the school year.Promotion to the sixth grade will be based on a combination of fifth-grade English and math test scores and a comprehensive portfolio of class work.Fifth-graders who score at Level 1 – the lowest of four rankings on citywide English or math tests – will not be permitted to move on to the sixth grade and will have the option of retaking the test after summer school or staying in the fifth grade until they can pass the exams. Pupils who have not been instructed in the English language for at least three years will be exempt.“This is a very smart ending social promotion thrust because our weakest link is our middle schools,” said the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. “If you really create a promotional standard at the fifth grade, before kids get into middle school, what you are doing is really giving the middle schools a running start.”By Mr. Bloomberg’s reckoning, students who graduate from fifth grade are doubly challenged: not only are they moving on to new schools, but they are also moving between classrooms, dealing with a roster of teachers in a single day and, as a result, they are expected to be more independent.“There are many chances for even high-performing students to lose their way,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Imagine the challenges for unprepared students. And if they get off course in middle school, what are the odds they can be rescued in high school?”Mr. Bloomberg’s decision to expand his social promotion fight is part of a wider re-election strategy aimed at making education the centerpiece of the 2005 mayoral campaign. Mr. Bloomberg wants to point to his accomplishments on education and then ask New Yorkers to give him four more years to finish what he started.Over the summer, more than 8,000 third-graders who didn’t have basic reading and math skills attended the city’s Summer Success Academies. 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. Those are the kind of numbers Mr. Bloomberg is hoping to present to voters next year.Still, there are plenty of school districts in the country that have tried to abolish social promotion only to throw their hands up in frustration. In April, the Houston Independent School District decided that its effort to end social promotion had increased dropout rates. Now, if a high school student has enough credits, he is allowed to graduate.Similarly, Chicago’s school board eased its promotion standards in March because it couldn’t quantify whether it was really helping students. Chicago is the third-largest school system in the country, with 600 schools and over 430,000 students. It has been working on ending social promotion for seven years and Mr. Bloomberg had used it as the model for the New York City program.An independent assessment of the Chicago program determined that the social promotion policy hadn’t raised test scores for third-graders significantly, and even seemed to lower test scores for sixth-graders.Those kinds of stories, according to the mayor’s critics and supporters alike, make Mr. Bloomberg’s decision to go for broke and expand his social promotion ban to fifth-graders, at best, problematic.Some union leaders have said the mayor should be focusing on students in the lower grades so there is earlier intervention. The principals’ union president, Jill Levy, said Mr. Bloomberg’s prescription would only stress out the city’s elementary schoolers.“This is more political than it is educational,” she said.Others, like public advocate Betsy Gotbaum, wonder why the mayor is in such a rush. “The mayor hasn’t even seen the results of his interventions in third grade,” she said.Jay Greene, an education policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, was more sanguine. “The problem with education reform is a lot of it isn’t backed by a large body of evidence,” he said. “I think the fifth grade standards are a sensible thing to try. But are they a proven reform? No.”

Mayor Vows to End Social Promotion Out of Fifth Grade

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