Building a Brighter Future
for Our Children
by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
Just
a few weeks ago, the new school year began for New York City’s
1.1 million public school students. And this school year,
we’re going to make sure that the youngsters who are
preparing to enter the middle grades get the skills they
need to do the work that’s expected of them. We’re
going to build on the demonstrated success of our 3rd grade
promotion policy, and ask the city’s Educational Policy
Panel to end social promotion in the 5th grade.
Here’s why. Most
students graduating from 5th grade go on from elementary
to middle schools. That’s
a crucial time of transition. In middle school, students spend
their days going from class to class, which means they often
receive less individual attention from their teachers. They’re
expected to do more of their work independently. The complexity
of coursework increases, and the pace accelerates. All of these
changes present difficult challenges for even high-performing
students; students who are academically unprepared can be overwhelmed.
And if students lose their way in middle school, the chances
of rescuing them in high school are slim.
Ending social promotion is a common sense policy
designed to improve the odds for all our
students. We’re going to identify the 5th graders who
need extra help, and provide it to them. Starting next month,
we’ll commit $20 million to an array of interventions
similar to those that have been, and will continue to be, used
to help 3rd graders. That includes classroom tutoring and computer-based
learning, not only during the regular school day, but also
before and after school, on weekends, and during school holidays.
It also includes involving parents more closely in their children’s
education.
Just take a look at what happened during the Summer
Success Academy, which was attended by 3rd graders who were
at risk of not being promoted based on their test scores in
reading, math, or both. Parents across the city seized on this
as a golden opportunity to get their sons and daughters the
extra help they needed. And the results? Better than 50 percent of 3rd graders who attended at least
ten days of the Summer Success Academy improved their reading
and math performance enough to be promoted. Tomorrow,
they’re going into 4th grade, ready to do 4th grade work.
That’s what we need to do with our 5th graders
as well. Every year for the last five years, an average of
12,500 5th graders who have scored at “Level 1” on
reading and math tests—which means they are utterly unprepared
for 6th grade work—have been promoted anyway. And there
are middle schools in our city where fewer than 10 percent
of students meet the basic standards of competency at their
grade levels.
This has to stop. Every
year that we wait represents another year of lost opportunity,
and thousands more lost students. Schools Chancellor Joel
Klein puts it this way: Let’s
educate our students before we promote them—not promote
them before we educate them. I couldn’t say it any better myself. #
