Nearly a quarter of the city's public-school kids aren't making the grade and may flunk - with the youngest students apparently in the deepest trouble, according to new Department of Education data.
A total of 245,084 kids - or 24.8 percent - got "promotion in doubt" letters in recent months, warning them they must step up their game or risk repeating a grade.
The good news is that it was a decrease of 1.5 percent, or more than 17,000 kids, from last year.
The letters are typically meant as more of a wake-up call to parents than as a hard and fast measure of student achievement, with just a portion of those who get letters ultimately being left back.
But the data shows that while kids in first and second grade were among the least likely to receive warning letters among all the grades, they also comprised the largest percentage of kids left back last year.
About 4,600 first-graders, or 6.1 percent of the class, and 3,600 second-graders, or 4.9 percent, were held back last year - a relatively large proportion of the roughly 20 percent of first- and second-graders who received warning letters that year.
By contrast, the amount of kids held back in third through eighth grade last year ranged from 1.3 to 3.9 percent - although 29.3 percent of students in those grades had gotten promotion warnings.
This year, kids in second grade and below were the only ones other than high school seniors who experienced an increase from last year in the percentage of those getting warnings.
"I would not rate that as necessarily a bad thing," said John Synder, dean of the graduate school at Bank Street College.
"If you were to take a look across the country in the last 40 years, you'd find that more kids were held back in the primary grades and were less likely to be held back later when the social stigma and other considerations start to kick in."
Department spokesman Andrew Jacob said decisions to hold the youngest kids back a grade were typically done with parent consultation at the end of the school year.
Performance on assessments and classroom assignments - as well as on last year's state math and reading tests for those who were in grades three through eight - are the primary determinants of who receives the warning letters.
Among all the grades, students in ninth grade were the likeliest to receive letters this year - with 36,557 students, or 35 percent of the class getting warned.
They were followed closely by 10th-graders (33.5 percent of the class, or 31,107 students) and eighth-graders (31.1 percent of the class, or 22,943 students).
Eighth-graders will join students in third, fifth and seventh grades next year in having to meet strict promotion guidelines under a policy that was approved by the department last month.
Students in those grades must score at least a 2 out of 4 on annual state math and reading tests and pass their core classes in order to advance, or else pass city math and reading tests at the end of summer school.
