The city's education policy board voted to make entering high school much more difficult for city kids during a raucous meeting Monday night in which protesters shouted, "Shame!"
The Panel For Educational Policy voted 11 to 1 to support Mayor Bloomberg's stricter eighth-grade promotion policy despite angry objections from parents.
The lone dissenter on the board was Patrick Sullivan, an appointee of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.
Starting next year, eighth-graders who flunk a major academic class or bomb a standardized math or reading exam will have to repeat the grade.
"What good does it do our students if we're sending them wholly unprepared into a high school environment?" Chancellor Joel Klein said after the vote was taken.
The vote was cast amid shouts of, "Shame on you" from about 85 people packed inside the Education Department's Tweed Courthouse headquarters. Another 50 or so protesters who couldn't fit into the room stood outside shouting, "Let us in!" There was so much yelling that the remainder of the meeting had to be suspended.
"You are just punishing students for the failure of their schools," Lenore Brown of Brooklyn, who has eight grandchildren in public schools, told the panel. The new policy comes at a time of deep cuts to the city's public schools.
The vote was hardly a surprise. The panel, which replaced the Board of Education when Mayor Bloomberg took over the schools in 2002, almost always offers unanimous support to his policies.
The one time that members of the panel signaled that they would oppose the mayor was when he sought similarly stringent promotion criteria for third-graders in 2004. Bloomberg fired his two appointees to the board and replaced them with more agreeable panelists. The Staten Island borough president also fired his appointee at the time.
Monday night, roughly four years after what came to be called the Monday Night Massacre, was far less dramatic.
With Adam Lisberg
