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Third Grade Retention—Déjà Vu All Over Again
By Noreen Connell

One of the most surreal episodes surrounding the controversy of the new “Gates” program for third graders was a March 17th press conference where both the Chancellor and the press developed a case of amnesia. Chancellor Klein sorrowfully noted that thirty-seven percent of the city’s ninth graders were failing, so a grade retention policy was urgently needed, “Right there is where you see why it is we can’t continue the way we’re going, which is pushing children through the elementary schools…” This was a case statement with one glaring logical problem. The cohort of students he was talking about were subjected to Mayor Giuliani’s far more draconian grade retention program when they were in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.

Advocates have also developed faulty memories. This new third-grade retention policy is actually an improvement over the Mayor Giuliani’s five-year-old policy, because the old one required retention from the third to eighth grades. Mayor Bloomberg’s program is much smaller. Given this lapse in short-term memory, here is a one-minute history: In 21 years, New Yorkers have had three Mayors—Koch, Giuliani, and now Bloomberg—proclaim that they will reduce the numbers of children who cannot read through a bold experiment. The experiment is simple: force the lowest-achieving students to go to summer school and then, if they don’t test well the second time, force them to repeat a grade.

Expensive
The public is never fully informed of just how often this policy has been put in place or how expensive it is. At the peak of the “Gates” program, the tab in the 1982-3 school year came to $58.9 million for the 4th and 8th grades. In the second year of the most recent experiment, which affected students in grades 3 to 8, the cost came to a staggering $536.4 million in 1999-2000. Mayor Bloomberg estimates in his Executive Budget for the 2004-5 school year that the cost for his policy will be $116 million. Sadly, this represents the only added city investment in improving instruction during the 2004-05 school year.

Troubling patterns
This investment would be worth the cost and effort if the experiment worked. By the second year of the last experiment with grade retention, troubling patterns emerged that were similar to the first experiment:

• Three fourths of students forced to attend summer school in 1999 had to go to summer school the next year.
• The 2000 assessment found that for one grade, at-risk children who attended summer school had lower test scores on average than they had on their first test.
• Even more perplexing, the group of students who were promoted in error tested at higher levels than students who were retained.

So even when the issue of the 30 to 50 percent increase in dropout rates of students who repeat a grade is factored out of the discussion, neither summer school, grade repetition, and additional instructional services seemed to have been particularly robust strategies for helping large numbers of children succeed. Yet, once again the New York City school system is embarking on a program to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these costly strategies.

Counterproductive practices
What other contributing factors are there in the high numbers of children in New York City testing at Level 1 in the early grades? EPP’s long involvement in trying to improve early-grade education has often encountered counterproductive administrative practices that weaken the quality of instruction from kindergarten to third grade. Here are some examples.
KINDERGARTEN STAFFING For over 25 years, there has been a relentless effort by city budget officials to reduce kindergarten staffing levels in the public schools. In 1960, the NYC Department of Health enacted a health code requiring all public and private day care centers and schools to limit kindergarten classes to no more than 25 children and to have a paraprofessional or assistant teacher in all classes of more than 15 children.
Public schools never met these standards, but until the 1975-76 fiscal crisis, kindergarten class sizes were getting smaller, close to an average of 21 students. By the 1985-86 school year, there were only 190 kindergarten paraprofessionals and systemwide the average class size was up to the maximum of 25 students. That year, the Chancellor secured a waiver exempting the public school system from the health code. In 1989, in response to a Legal Aid Society lawsuit, the waiver was struck down. Five years later, 42 percent of classes had a paraprofessional, but the average kindergarten class size had grown to almost 27 students.
In 1995, Mayor Giuliani demanded that the health code be amended so that the public schools were no longer covered by kindergarten class size limits and adult-to child staffing ratios. This past year, there was another round of paraprofessional layoffs, some affecting kindergartens. There appears to be a policy of eliminating paraprofessionals whenever class sizes come down to 25 students. In contrast, private schools and child care centers continue to staff their kindergartens with at least two adults whenever there are more than 15 children in a class.
EARLY-GRADE CLASS SIZES Since Chancellor Nathan Quinones, no other Chancellor has implemented a plan to reduce class sizes in the early grades. A body of research since 1987 affirmed his belief that low-income students need more individual attention. The standards he set 17 years ago, for class sizes of 25 in the early grades, remain the city standards today.

Since 1999, the NYS Legislature has provided funds to New York City to reduce class sizes in early grades, kindergarten to third, to an average of 20 students. When the budget policy was first enacted, the Board of Education succeeded in getting a portion of these funds re-directed to the eighth grade. Worse, still NYC education officials argue every year for “budget flexibility” to use these funds for other purposes and to eliminate the budgetary requirement of having to actually reduce class size. Last year, a coalition of groups, including the United Federation of Teachers, Class Size Matters, and the United Parents Associations mounted a campaign to put the question of class size on the ballot by gathering115,842 signatures from New York City registered voters . The Mayor went to court to block the initiative. This year, anecdotal information indicates that in some schools receiving state funds for class size reduction, no classes are at an average of 20 students. Because of NYS Education Department understaffing, there seems to be little effort at monitoring the use of $88 million in state funding for this purpose.
“TEST-GRADE” PRACTICES The most comprehensive study of small-class-size benefit, conducted in Tennessee, as well as a University of Wisconsin study of class size reduction ,confirm that when students are placed in small size class in kindergarten or first grade, their achievement levels improve measurably compared with children who remain in large size class. This improvement is sustained when children remain in small classes up through third grade. However, both studies found that when students are placed in small classes for the first time in the second or third grades, no significant achievement gains take place. The analogy that EPP has used to explain this phenomenon is that successful farmers do not water their crops only a month before harvest.
A last-minute watering the crops is exactly what many elementary school principals try to do. They place their best teachers and reduce class sizes in third grade, when students face city tests, and the fourth grade, when students face the much more important state tests. But it is in kindergarten when children need to expand their cognitive and verbal abilities and in first grade when they should begin learning how to read. Learning difficulties begin manifesting themselves in the first and second grades when good teachers in small enough classes could quickly help children move beyond whatever barriers they are experiencing. Yet these are often the neglected grades when it comes to principals’ decisions on class sizes and staff assignments.
Research is ignored
Why does New York City continue to adopt the unsuccessful strategy of grade retention? One explanation is that the policy of having children repeat a grade appeals to deeply held beliefs about individual responsibility, hard work, and promotion to higher grades based on merit. When past grade retention policies fail to raise student achievement, these beliefs are so ingrained that these policies are resurrected once again in the hopes that a better administered program will work.
Another explanation is that the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has kept alive the myth that the 1982 Gates Program was a “success” that was “sabotaged” by neglect and underfunding by successive Chancellors. This myth has done double damage. First, it induces new policy makers to once again adopt this strategy. Secondly, it forces education officials to make sure that they cannot be accused of undercutting this
strategy, so staff time is taken up with trying to make sure that there is early notification for summer school, better summer school attendance, and services for children who are forced to repeat a grade. The administration of Chancellor Harold Levy is a prime example of how the grade retention policy consumed the best efforts of central and district staff with little tangible results.
Yet a third explanation is that budget and education policy makers have been influenced by an even more damaging myth than the one sustained by the Manhattan Institute. It lacks a name, but the best descriptive term for it is “patch-up.” At every level of failing urban public school systems there is an illogical belief that it is easier and less expensive to provide meaningful help to students who fail than it is to prevent students from failing. This is illogical for two reasons. Systemwide policies to improve low-performing schools, reduce class size, attract and retain good teachers, sustain staff development, and align curricula have been shown to succeed in reducing the numbers of children who cannot read by third or fourth grade. In contrast, remediation programs of all kinds, except one-to-one tutoring, have only shown marginal improvements in student performance. The problem is that for every well-run remediation program, there is a poorly-run remediation program. For the two years, 1996 and 1997, when the Board of Education was forced by federal regulations to detail the year-to-year gains of students receiving Title 1 services based on test score comparison of the same students, there were a signifiant number of remediation programs where students’ achievement levels actually decreased. This reality is one of the reason why an army of researchers since the 1980’s has been unable to document any large-scale benefits of Title 1 funded programs. The result is that Title 1 was restructured to focus on the identification of low-performing schools, not the provision of remediation services.
The second problem with the “patch-up” approach is that it fails to recognize that once students begin to flounder academically, a complex set of problems manifest themselves that require much greater effort and more skilled intervention than occur in a regular classroom. Though EPP as a coalition has advocated for smaller class sizes since 1996, we do not believe that placing low-achieving students in smaller classes is a sufficient turnaround strategy for children who are experiencing failure. These struggling students must have the benefit of a highly experienced, skillful teachers and an enriched curriculum, which is rare in remediation programs and low performing schools. Summer school and extra services for students held back are the prime example of the “patch-up” approach. The first question that the Mayor and the Chancellor should be asking is why so many children are failing to read by third grade. They should be primarily focusing on strategies to ensure that more children succeed, such as reducing class sizes for all young children—rather than just reducing class sizes for those who fall between the cracks, when smaller class sizes are not enough to reverse the damage. •

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