Six months after Mayor Bloomberg announced that from now on fifth graders would not be allowed to graduate to middle school unless they were able to approach grade-level standards, the Department of Education is quietly looking for a researcher to investigate the efficacy of the policy.

The department issued a request for proposals, seeking a well-qualified outside evaluator to conduct a multi-year, longitudinal study of the implementation and impact of its new policy of holding back struggling fifth-graders.

At a press conference at the start of this school year, Mr. Bloomberg spoke proudly of the initial success of his controversial plan to end the so-called “social promotion” of third-graders. He said 41% of the third-graders who originally scored at the lowest level, Level 1, on their math or English exams moved to Level 2 by the end of summer school. That, the mayor said, meant that the students who were promoted were better equipped to handle the work of the fourth grade than the lagging third graders had been in the past, when students were routinely promoted without mastering third-grade skills.

Tabulations by the Department of Education found the policy had been so successful in its first year that Mr. Bloomberg wanted to expand it, forcing fifth-graders to score above Level 1 on math and English assessments before graduating to middle school.

“School reform is a high-stakes enterprise,” the mayor said at the time. “There will always be criticism. There will always be missteps, and things we would have done differently given a second chance. That can’t shake our confidence or determination to do what we know is right.”

But now, as the fifth-graders prepare to take the springtime English Language Arts and Mathematics exams that could determine whether they start sixth grade in September or repeat fifth grade, the education department quietly issued a request for proposals from outside parties to evaluate the efficacy of its policy.

The request, made at the recommendation of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, says that in the past six years, a total of 100,000 fifth-graders have scored at the lowest level on their math and English tests. The vast majority of those students – between 72% and 88% – were promoted anyway to sixth grade. But, the request says, by the eighth grade fewer than 1% of those promoted students were meeting or exceeding grade-level standards, scoring at Level 3 or 4. And the students who enter high school performing at Level 1 rarely have the skills or knowledge to graduate four years later.

The department wants to find a professor or private evaluator to gauge the impact of sending struggling fifth-graders to the 5th Grade Preparatory Academy – a set of remedial classes held on Saturdays for youngsters who are expected to score poorly on the standardized tests – and the impact of sending students who fail the exams to summer school before giving them the option of retaking the exams in August.

It also wants an evaluation of the Preparatory Academy teachers, an assessment of struggling students’ attitudes toward school before and after the academic interventions, and an analysis of attendance at the Preparatory Academy and summer school.

In the longer term, the department expects the evaluator to observe this year’s fifth-graders – as well as third-graders held to the new policy – for the next four years, to find out how the students perform on tests and view school over time. The department hasn’t said how much it will pay for the evaluation.

While many education professionals who talked to The New York Sun praised the department for seeking to bring in an outsider to evaluate whether or not its promotion policy works, some elected officials and others questioned why the city didn’t do more research before implementing the policy, and others questioned the department’s motives. “Evaluating the new promotion policy is a good idea, but it may be a little late,” the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, said.

Ms. Gotbaum, a frequent critic of Bloomberg administration school policies, continued: “The DOE should have done more evaluating before they rushed the policy through. Now if they find out that the policy is bad, thousands of children who are being left back will pay the price for the DOE’s mistakes.”

The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, called the request for proposals “another amazing indication of the lack of public discourse about any of these policies.

“Even though, intuitively, many of us believe that if you have standards you have to have a way of enforcing those standards … to presume that a policy is the best thing since sliced bread and then to very quietly, some months afterwards, say that we are going to now have a study to assess whether it is, is one more indication of the lack of transparency, the lack of public debate, and the lack of accountability in Tweed’s restructuring of education,” she said.

After reading the request, Ms. Weingarten added that the department should be looking for information about how the heightened focus on testing in the new policy has affected lessons and how it has changed the amount of paperwork generated for teachers.

“The RFP has been written essentially like a press release for the Department of Education when they announced their policy, instead of really looking at all aspects of what happened here this year and what has been lost because of the imposition of all the new bureaucracy,” the union president said.

The RFP doesn’t exactly gloat about the mayor’s policy, but it does include some of the department’s positive data about the success of the third-grade policy, and it lays out details from what academic interventions struggling fifth-graders receive to what appeals process is available when students fail.

The chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, said that, in general, it’s a good idea to keep track of and evaluate whether the controversial program is working. But she said it seems as though the department could conduct much of the yearly data collection itself, rather than wait for a third party to issue a long-term report.

“These are the kinds of questions I think you’d want to know every year,” she said. “It just seems so critical that I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want that in-house.”

A spokeswoman for the education department, Michele McManus Higgins, said: “The department is seeking an outside organization in order to get an independent and comprehensive review of the impact of the policy.”

An independent review of a similar plan for multiple grades in Chicago’s public schools, which was released last April, resulted in largely negative findings about the policy. Chicago researchers found that the strict promotion rules had not helped third-graders and had led to higher dropout rates for students who failed eighth grade and were forced to repeat it. Previous studies in Chicago found that the summer school program for struggling students was sometimes helpful, and that some eighth-graders worked harder after they were held back.