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Nearly 35,000 elementary and middle school students are being told this week that they should attend summer school based on their low test scores, the city Department of Education announced today.

The figure — 34,069 students between third and eighth grade, to be precise — represents nine percent of all students in those grades. And it is an increase of more than 10,000 from the number of students recommended for summer school last year.

As part of Mayor Bloomberg’s vaunted initiative to end what he calls “social promotion,” students who do not pass annual state English and math exams must either attend summer school or repeat their grade.

The figures released today are the first public indication of what city students’ performance on state tests this year might look like. The results have not yet been released. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg's senior education adviser Chris Cerf (left) and former Congressman Herman Badillo touted the mayor's promotion and retention policies on the steps of City Hall this afternoon.

Chris Cerf, the former Department of Education deputy chancellor turned senior education adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, said today that the RAND report released this week on the mayor’s promotion policies “completely vindicates” those policies.

Flanked by former Congressman Herman Badillo, Cerf said that the mayor’s rival, Comptroller Bill Thompson, showed a lack of leadership for failing to support stricter retention policies during his tenure as president of the city’s Board of Education.

Badillo, who has also served as the chairman of the City College of New York and who endorsed Bloomberg in July, said that he urged the Board of Education to end social promotion throughout Thompson’s term to no avail.

“I have been against social promotion for decades,” he said.”In Puerto Rico, where I come from, if you do your work, you pass, and if you don’t, you don’t pass.”

Thompson’s campaign has pointed out that he voted for a measure in 1999 that required low-performing third through eighth grade students to repeat a grade of attend summer school. Cerf called that opposition to social promotion “halfhearted,” and countered that Thompson opposed Bloomberg’s efforts to introduce new promotion and retention standards in 2004. (more…)

Number of students retained or needing academic intervention services, 2004-2008

A highly anticipated independent research study on the effects of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s promotion and retention policies says that fifth graders benefit from the promotion practices — at least through their seventh grade year.

The policy requires that students in several grades reach a certain level on state math and reading tests before going on to the next grade. Citing years of research, critics have charged that the new rules wouldn’t help students and could possibly hurt them or cause them to drop out of school later.

But researchers at the RAND Corporation, which conducted the study, said that hasn’t happened.

The lowest-performing students who took tests under the new promotion policy did better later than earlier students who weren’t held to the new standards. The study compared the first three classes of fifth-graders held to the promotion standards to the previous class of students who were not affected by the new policy.

The report said students benefit because their schools identify them as at-risk earlier and give them extra help.

Students surveyed for the report also said being held back didn’t make them less confident about school. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to expand a social promotion ban will likely be the first item on the school board’s agenda when they reconvene. But board members will have to vote on the proposal before the results of the only research on the effects of holding back failing students in the city have been released.

The results of a study that the city commissioned from the research institute the RAND Corporation in 2004 are scheduled to be released this fall, according to Department of Education spokesman Andy Jacob. But that will almost certainly come after the Panel for Educational Policy votes on the proposed expansion of Bloomberg’s new promotional standards to include fourth and sixth graders.

(The Panel for Educational Policy was dissolved after mayoral control expired June 30 but will reconvene now that the Senate has re-authorized the law.)

Less than two percent of third, fifth and seventh graders were held back last year under Mayor Bloomberg's tougher promotion standards. Data provided by the New York City Department of Education.

Preliminary results of the RAND study, which looks at the performance of third and fifth graders affected by the Mayor’s promotion policy over time and will include data from the 2008-2009 school year, were delivered to the Department of Education last year, Jacob said. The study was designed to follow students for five years, Jacob said, and so final results of the study will not be available until the research is completed.

The RAND Corporation did release a working paper in 2006 that surveyed promotion and retention policies around the United States and placed New York City’s practices in context.

Even without research findings on the end of social promotion in New York City, Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein insist that holding back failing schoolchildren benefits them unquestionably. (more…)

The Bloomberg and Thompson campaigns spent the afternoon jealously guarding their claims to having ended social promotion, though whether either candidate has ended the practice is debatable.

Bloomberg campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson led the attack this afternoon, saying that as president of the Board of Education Bill Thompson, currently the city’s comptroller, failed to end social promotion. Broadly defined, social promotions means that students are bumped from one grade to the next irrespective of academic problems.

Thompson’s campaign shot back, defending the mayoral hopeful. “Bill Thompson was at the forefront of ending social promotion long before Mike Bloomberg decided to claim this initiative as his own,” read an email from the campaign.

In 1999, when Thompson was president of the Board of Education, he did vote for a measure that forced students in grades 3-8 who had low test scores, poor grades, and abysmal attendance to take summer school or repeat a grade. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg called for an end to social promotion for the city’s fourth and sixth graders this morning, a change that would expand one of the most hotly debated education policies of his tenure.

At a press conference this morning, the mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein called their efforts to end social promotion “a great success,” citing rising test scores and the decreasing number of students enrolled in summer school. Ending social promotion means that students who do not meet proficiency standards on state tests are held back until they do. Some of these students attend summer school and are bumped to the next grade in the fall when they pass the exam, while others can have waivers signed that let them out of retention program.

Bloomberg said that once the citywide school board is reconstituted, he would ask it to end the policy in grades four and six — the only remaining tested grades in which social promotion is still in practice. In 2004, when several board members told the mayor that they would vote against ending third grade social promotion, he had them removed and replaced overnight with people who supported his policies. The event is commonly known as the “Monday Night Massacre.”

Standing in the library of the Patrick Henry School (P.S. 171) in East Harlem, Bloomberg said that with the new retention policy, “kids will either learn what they need or teachers will know they haven’t learned.”

Asked about researchers’ claims that retention policies can raise the dropout rate, Bloomberg said he was “speechless,” adding, “It’s pretty hard to argue that it does not work.” Klein said that since 2004, when the DOE ended social promotion for third graders, support for its end has been “unanimous.”

There is significant opposition to the administration’s retention policies, said Norm Fruchter, director of the community involvement program of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)

Should middle school students have to earn credits in specific courses in order to graduate and enter high school? That’s what middle school teacher Adam Berlin proposes in a column in EdWeek:

A graduation credit system that included grades 7-12 would help establish the academic accountability currently lacking in middle schools. In such a system, middle school students, needing to earn credits toward graduation, would repeat failed classes as they do in high school. Ideally, they also would come to understand at the age of 11 or 12—not as 14-year-olds—that it is important to study and do your work.

He says that social promotion is problematic for allowing students to coast into high school without necessary skills. But retaining students is also problematic, he writes, because students who are held back have to repeat courses they’ve passed in addition to those they’ve failed.

Berlin proposes that students make up failed courses in the summer. Summer school would focus on key concepts and skills from the failed course, rather than trying to review all course content, and would also emphasize skills needed for the following year’s course. And summer work would culminate in alternative assessments that would allow students to demonstrate key content and skills, rather than comprehensive final exams.

Should we make middle school promotion work more like high school? What do you think?