Promotion Policy Redux
March 17th, 2008
Tonight the Panel on Educational Policy, the largely toothless body that has replaced the Board of Education, will get to vote on a weighty matter: whether New York City eighth graders who fail to achieve a certain level on standardized tests should go on to high school or be forced to repeat eighth grade.
The Bloomberg administration backs the benchmark, characterizing it as a fight against “social promotion.” If the policy is adopted, some 18,000 eighth graders could be left back, compared to the 1,300 retained last year, according to the Daily News.
No one says flat out that they support social promotion — letting a student advance to the next grade simply because he or she has reached a certain chronological age — but opposition exists to the latest school “reform.” Critics say the mayor’s policy is too tied to tests, penalizes students for having the bad luck to attend poor schools and does nothing to improve the performance of those left back.
Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer’s representative on the board, has indicated he will vote against the policy, according to today’s Sun, and Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion has asked Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to postpone the vote until the Department of Education sets out a plan to improve student achievement in middle schools. The two also reportedly noted that a study of the effectiveness of city’s retention policies, which ties third, fifth and seventh grade promotion to standardized test scores, will not be complete until next year.
On Thursday, members of the Coalition for Educational Justice, which opposes the plan, demonstrated Tweed Courthouse to demand — in vain — a meeting with Klein.
In an op-ed in today�s Sun, Norm Fruchter, director of the community involvement program of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, discusses the dismal state of many city middle schools and asks, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to postpone the [promotion] vote until the improvement plan has been developed and implemented? Otherwise, holding more students back without offering such a plan is punishing eighth-graders for the instructional failures of their middle school years.”
New York City Public School Parents blog notes that this vote will come almost four years to the day (minus one) of the panel vote on third grade promotion. On that day, the mayor engineered the ouster of four members of the panel who had expressed reservations about the policy.
Will that happen again?
It’s unlikely he’ll have to. In its entire existence that is the only time the panel ever came close to bucking the mayor.
By Gail Robinson on March 17, 2008, 1:42 pmIn category: Education, Gotham City | No Comments »

