TALKING POINT
Holding back middle-schoolers not the solution
By Leonie Haimson
In his State of the City address last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the New York City Department of Education will now extend the policy of holding back students on the basis of their test scores to eighth-graders, in addition to the third-, fifth- and seventh-graders who already face this prospect. This could mean the retention of an additional 18,000 students next year. Clearly, in terms of their educational policies, the administration has run out of even bad ideas.
As research and experience show, holding kids back doesn’t work. More than 100 leading academics, researchers and national experts on testing signed our Class Size Matters letter opposing the administration’s proposal to retain third-graders back in 2004, saying that basing promotional decisions on standardized tests is not only unfair, given the unreliability of a single exam, but also leads to lower achievement and higher drop-out rates. (For a copy of this letter, check out the Class Size matters Website at classsizematters.org/retentionletter.html.)
Nothing has changed since then. In fact, if this policy had worked, the administration’s policy of holding back seventh-graders for the last two years would have caused a rise in eighth-grade achievement. Instead, as revealed by the city’s results on the national assessments called NAEPs, or National Assessment of Educational Progress, test scores in these grades have stagnated or declined.
Among those who signed our letter to the mayor were Dr. T. Berry Brazelton; Dr. Ernest House, who did the independent evaluation of New York City’s failed retention program in the 1980s; four past presidents of the American Education Research Association; the chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Appropriate Use of Educational Testing; and several members of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council. Even the two largest testing companies are on record that the decision to hold back a child should never be based upon test scores alone. Indeed, the professional consensus is so clear about the negative effects of this policy on students’ academic and emotional health that it amounts to educational malpractice, according to Prof. Shane Jimerson of the University of California.
In reality, everyone who’s looked at our middle schools realizes that their No. 1 problem is huge class sizes. In these grades, we expect a lot from our students. We expect them to learn how to read and analyze complex literature, write essays and research papers, master computational skills and begin algebra—all of this when their bodies, relationships and sense of self are in rapid transition. Yet our schools offer none of the intellectual or emotional support that students need during this crucial time.
Instead, in New York City, our middle-schoolers are crammed into the largest classes in the state, and some of the largest in the entire industrialized world. Class sizes average 26 to 27, and a fourth of students are in classes of 31 or more, even in many failing schools. As a result, teachers are simply unable to provide these students with the support and attention they need, either in class or with their homework.
Even those who were thriving and motivated up to this point begin to become disengaged, disillusioned and fall behind. Here are the words of one parent: “For both her elementary and middle school years, my daughter had wonderful and dedicated public school teachers. At one of the better middle schools in the city, she had 38 kids in her class. Each teacher taught four classes. With almost 150 students, how can one teacher be expected to prepare lessons, teach class, grade papers and have time left to focus on the individual child? My daughter’s grades weren’t the highest or the lowest. She fell into the vast middle, as do the majority of kids.”
“At her middle school, my daughter was utterly lost and very unhappy. She was forgotten. No, not forgotten—never known. It is a crime that at this crucial turning point, when adolescents are searching for an identity to call their own, they are tossed into huge classes with no one who has the time to see them as individuals.”
Yet this administration refuses to take affirmative steps to make sure that these students are better known by their teachers through class-size reduction, even in the face of a new state mandate to do so. Rather than providing smaller classes, the new policy to hold back more eighth-graders will likely cause classes in this grade to swell even larger, as more students are stalled at this level and prevented from moving on into high school. Frustrated by their lack of progress, and by their inability to get the help that they need, many will eventually drop out.
It’s a shame that this administration refuses to take action by actually improving the opportunities for our children to succeed, but rather insists on increasing the chances that they will fail.
Haimson is director of the parents’ advocacy group Class Size Matters.
