The group lining up against Mayor Bloomberg's latest education initiative is getting larger, as two borough presidents appear set to challenge Mr. Bloomberg on the proposal today.
The policy would prevent eighth-graders from moving to high school if they score poorly on standardized English and math tests or fail to pass certain core classes. The teachers union, principals union, and parent groups have opposed it. Proposed by the mayor in his State of the City address, to be official the policy requires the approval of the Panel for Education Policy at its meeting tonight. Since Albany transferred control of the city schools to the mayor in 2002, the panel has never vetoed a mayoral policy.
Panel members — including the five appointed by the borough presidents and eight appointed by Mr. Bloomberg — have usually lined up behind proposals, ever since four years ago, when Mr. Bloomberg averted a veto by firing two appointees who were set to oppose a policy the night before the vote. That policy, cracking down on so-called social promotion by making it more difficult to move out of third grade, is a model for this one.
Manhattan's representative, Patrick Sullivan, is set to vote against the eighth-grade policy today. In a statement, the president of Manhattan, Scott Stringer, said he asked Mr. Sullivan to vote no because retaining students "rarely works."
The president of the Bronx, Adolfo Carrion Jr., sent Schools Chancellor Joel Klein a letter Friday asking him to postpone today's vote. He said the plan fails to map out ways to help students meet the standards and does not demonstrate how the city would pay for extra help given budget cuts.
Messrs. Sullivan and Carrion both noted that an ongoing study of the city's current retention policies being conducted by the RAND Corporation has not yet reached a conclusion. It is to be a longitudinal study that will end in 2009.
The Department of Education's chief operating officer, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, said 2009 would be too long to wait, citing heightening graduation standards phased in for this year's ninth-graders that make it far more difficult to graduate high school. "We really need this policy now," she said. "We can't have those kids going on and setting themselves up for failure."
Data collected by the department also support retention, Ms. Anagnostopoulos said. At all grade levels, the gap in the portion of low-scoring students who pass tests after being retained, versus after a decision not to retain them, is at least 20 percentage points large and often larger, Ms. Anagnostopoulos said.
