US News

BLOOMBERG FLUNKS SOCIAL PROMOTION

Social promotion is getting demoted.

Mayor Bloomberg is seeking to end the longstanding practice of moving students to the next grade even when they can’t meet performance standards in the fourth and sixth grades.

Bloomberg already introduced higher promotion standards in recent years for grades 3, 5, and 7, as well as in eighth grade last year. The new standards require students to score at least a 2 on a 4-point scale on state math and reading tests.

Those who don’t reach the minimum are given a second opportunity in summer school, as well as through an appeal based on their coursework.

“When we promote a child to the next grade who can’t handle the work, we’re setting that child up to fail in later grades,” Bloomberg said at PS 171 in East Harlem.

If the policy had been applied to them this past school year, more than 4,000 fourth-graders and 3,500 sixth-graders would have been at risk of being held back a grade.

Fewer than 900 third- and seventh-graders were held back in 2008, while fewer than 350 fifth-graders were retained that year — considerably less than in the years before social promotion was halted in those grades.

The smaller number of hold-backs came hand in hand with rising test scores.

When the mayor first sought to eliminate social promotion in third grade in 2004, it caused a furor — with many parents and educators saying it was a punitive measure that offered no supports for students to meet the higher standards.

The opposition was so fierce that Bloomberg had to remove several members of the Panel for Education Policy in order to ensure the measure’s passage.

But last year, the opposition to the eighth-grade policy was relatively muted.

While he said he welcomed the mayor’s bid to end social promotion, United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew again called attention to the need for more student support.

“Adding the fourth and sixth grades to the city’s promotion policy is clearly a step in the right direction,” he said. “But we also need to ensure that effective support and intervention services are in place and available for underachieving students.”

The policy change has to be approved by a newly reconstituted Panel for Education Policy before it can go into effect.

The panel was dismantled when the mayoral-control law lapsed June 30, but it will be reformed once Gov. Paterson signs the six-year renewal of mayoral control into law.

That signing could come as early as today, sources said.

Just hours after Bloomberg’s announcement, his re-election campaign team issued a lengthy statement slamming city Comptroller Bill Thompson, a mayoral candidate, for his failings on the issue.

They said Thompson had failed to institute a true end to social promotion despite trying as Board of Education president in 1999, and they criticized the comptroller for calling the mayor’s 2004 policy “flawed” when it was proposed.

Thompson’s camp shot back, “Bill Thompson was at the forefront of ending social promotion long before Mike Bloomberg decided to claim this initiative as his own.”

Additional reporting by David Seifman

yoav.gonen@nypost.com