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Hold back 3rd-graders? No
A school's decision to hold back a student should never be made on the basis of test scores alone. And yet, that is precisely what Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg are proposing in their new student retention plan.
Every major educational research and professional testing organization opposes the use of high-stakes tests to make this decision. They realize that judging a student on the basis of a single score is unreliable and unfair. A third-grader might feel ill on the day of testing, make a mistake in filling out the bubbles or simply not perform well on standardized exams. The American Educational Research Association, the National Board on Educational Testing, the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics all oppose using test scores to judge whether to hold back a child.
Even the two companies that produce the city's third-grade tests, Harcourt and CTB McGraw, are on record that a test score should never be used as the sole criterion. Harcourt, which authored the reading test, has written that the tests "probably should receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day classroom performance, maturity level and attitude."
Moreover, an evaluation of the city's retention policy in the 1980s found that children held back on the basis of their test scores achieved no more than similar students who had been promoted and that they were more likely to drop out, even after attending summer school and receiving special intervention of the sort Klein has proposed this time around.
Not only will this plan be unfair and ineffective, though, it will also be extremely expensive. Just paying for 15,000 students to repeat third grade will cost more than $150 million. With the same dollars, classes could be reduced by three students in every classroom in grades K-3, a reform that has been proven to work. Many more students would be reading and doing math at grade level, and fewer would eventually drop out of school and become a burden on society.
All in all, the evidence against blanket retention is so overwhelming that one suspects that the real reason Mayor Bloomberg and the chancellor want to hold back higher numbers of low-performing third-graders is to artificially boost next year's fourth-grade test scores to make their reforms look more effective. They should rethink this disastrous proposal before it is too late.
Haimson is a New York City public school parent and chair of Class Size Matters, a parent advocacy group.
— Leonie Hamson
Hold back 3rd-graders? No
New York Daily News
2004-01-18
http://www.nydailynews.com/01-18-2004/news/story/155847p-136966c.html
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