In yet another sign of the de Blasio Department of Education’s eagerness to wave schoolchildren on to the next grade even if they’re not actually ready to do the work, it’s requiring fewer than one in 20 students in grades 3 through 8 to attend summer school this year.
Specifically, that’s just 15,694 kids — which is roughly a tenth of the number who failed to pass the state math or English exam. (Thanks to the dubious priorities of the state Education Department, this year’s exam scores don’t get reported until September, but more than 150,000 kids in those grades failed to pass at least one of the two exams last year.)
In all, mandatory summer-school assignments are down by half over 2013, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s last year. And the trend is clear, dropping each year since de Blasio took over — when it had been rising under Bloomberg, peaking at 10 percent (32,205) in 2013.
As we’ve warned time and again, it’s part and parcel of the return of “social promotion,” the policy of moving children on to the next grade whether they’re ready or not.
Ex-Chancellor Carmen Fariña eased the requirements for promotion by relying more on teachers’ subjective assessments and less on test scores. Meanwhile, the Legislature, Gov. Cuomo and the state Education Department joined to kill the requirement that students score a “two” or higher (on a four-point scale!) on both state exams to win promotion.
As a result, the share of city schoolchildren in grades 3-8 denied promotion to the next grade fell from 0.9 percent in 2015 to 0.5 percent in 2017 — when only 1,445 kids repeated a grade.
A city Department of Education statement pretends the shift is the result of improved vetting and better summer programs: “More comprehensive evaluations including portfolios, as well as enhancements to summer programming, have given students greater opportunity to demonstrate progress in ELA and math.”
And never mind all those sham “credit-recovery” programs The Post has exposed — even though they’re surely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to city schools finding ways to cover up their failure to teach.
Then there’s last month’s Post exposé on IS 171 Principal Indira Mota — who wrote many parents of sixth-grade students saying she’d have required summer school if she had the funds.
The DOE insists Mota only meant kids who would’ve benefited from summer classes but were qualified to move up, not ones who needed them. But Mota herself declined to clarify — and her letter stressed, “Please be advised that your child has to attain a 75% or above in each subject.”
Moving unprepared kids on to the next grade, year after year, guarantees that most of them won’t finish high school ready for the workplace, let alone college.
Sadly, it’s plain that new Chancellor Richard Carranza won’t rock this boat: He’s too busy diving into a destructive war to impose racial quotas on the schools — a fight over dividing up the education pie, rather than a crusade to deliver better results for all.