No, the dropoff in city summer-school enrollment is not a sign of progress. It’s proof that the bad old days of “social promotion” are back: The system is sending children on to the next grade, even though they’re not ready.
Any who doubt it need only review Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s own words.
If a child hasn’t mastered the basics in one grade before moving on to the next, he or she is at great risk of falling even further behind. But many schools and teachers would rather pass the hard-to-teach kids along, anyway.
To stop that, Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s chancellors insisted that kids who failed state English or math tests attend summer school. Those who did well enough would move on — those who didn’t would repeat the grade.
But Fariña changed that last year. Instead, “a comprehensive evaluation of student work using multiple measures” decides who moves on. The change, she promised “keeps rigorous standards in place.”
To that end, the same Department of Education press release promised, about the same 10 percent of students in grades 3 to 8 would wind up in summer school. (“The DOE anticipates consistent levels of retention with this new approach.”)
Oops: When summer-school numbers came out a few months later, enrollment was down 25 percent. Fariña insisted it was an “anomaly” — not a sign of lower standards.
Funny: This year, enrollment has fallen again — for a total drop of 57 percent from Team Bloomberg’s last year. The drop translates to 12,000 fewer children in grades 3 to 8 being helped to keep up — most of them surely among the city’s most underprivileged.
How exactly is this “progressive”?
It gets harder and harder to blame the Legislature for its doubts about leaving the city schools under the control of Fariña and her boss, Mayor de Blasio.