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Op-Ed By SAM GILLIAN There is something quite deceptive about the way Mayor Bloomberg recently handled the social promotion policy in our city schools. The deception was not in the overly aggressive manner in which he engineered the vote of the Education Department's Panel for Education Policy. The deception was not in his refusal to even consider the possibility that social promotion might be a better choice than holding students over. No, the deception occurred in our mayor's pandering to public opinion, opinion which is generally uninformed and easily manipulated. With the public, the mayor was on solid ground. The vast majority of New Yorkers are against social promotion, so Bloomberg lost almost no votes in his next run for mayor. The deception occurs because the mayor knows that the vast majority of New Yorkers have no real understanding of "the good, the bad and the ugly" when it comes to whether to socially promote a child or not. What the public does not generally understand is that even those who decide to promote socially are against social promotions. Nobody in education wants children to go on to the next grade ill prepared to do the work -- nobody! Children are not socially promoted because educators think that it is a good thing to do. They are socially promoted because educators have learned from long and tortuous experience that it may be the better thing to do. Dozens of research studies have come to the same conclusion: policies that force holding over children in the same grade are "costly and counterproductive." Neither promoting failing students nor holding them over has proven beneficial. What does work is early intervention, especially in or before kindergarten. Held-over students do not make achievement gains and there is a strong increase in their dropout rates. The general public does not have this heightened awareness, so it is easily deceived and manipulated by politicians who make an intensely debated and complex issue seem clear cut and simple. Chicago has recently learned, after nine years, that eliminating social promotions did not substantially help its third graders, as all it got was little in the way of achievement gains and a higher dropout rate. Having been burnt by what appears to our mayor and chancellor to be a simple solution -- "hold 'em over" -- Chicago now has decided not to even count math scores as a promotion standard to the fourth grade. In addition, its new policy is that no child will repeat the same grade twice or be held over more than two times between kindergarten and eighth grade. The Chicago experience, like many before it, puts the lie to what our mayor and chancellor are doing here in New York City. Every careful educational observer knows that if they were really serious about ending social promotions, they would not have just picked on third graders, children who have not had the kind of educational intervention needed in their early years. So, the question that immediately arises is, why did the mayor strive so desperately -- against the advice of his own appointed advisors -- to hold over third graders only? The answer is clear. Next year is an election year. Bloomberg needs to show that his educational policies are working. He needs a spike in test scores at the fourth grade level -- before the election. What's one way to get such a rise in scores? Based upon a single test, hold over an astounding 15,000 or more third graders, something no reasonable educator would propose doing and something that even the mayor or his successor will have to alter. If the mayor does get his massive number of holdovers, the media will report a significant rise in test scores for fourth graders next year -- just before the election and after most citizens will have forgotten just how the rise in scores was deceptively manipulated at the expense of improperly prepared children. As newly-minted educational leaders, our chancellor and mayor have set a terrifying pattern of adhering passionately to bad advice, rejecting sound advice, ignoring quality research, refusing to adjust their errors in any reasonable way, repeatedly lying to the public, retreating into secrecy when their educational decisions are challenged, etc. Their bunker mentality, sadly, won't help children succeed because education is an area of human activity that cries out for open discussion, cooperation and rational adjustments to previously erroneous decisions. Sam Gillian, a Tracey Towers resident, taught English for 21 years at MS 145.
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