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MEMO

 
 Date: 3/4/04

From: Noreen Connell, Educational Priorities Panel

To: Councilmembers Eva Moskowitz, Margarita Lopez, and Robert Jackson

Last night during my testimony, I promised that I would give you a copy of a NYS Education Department school-by-school breakout of how many children are testing at Level 1 on the 4th grade English Language Arts test in New York City. As you can see, the variation is enormous. The children who will be most affected by the proposed grade retention policy will be those who are already disadvantaged by attending a low-performing school. These are the schools that are creating academic failure. They need to be turned around.

In contrast, from the same data source, are suburban districts outside of New York City where the majority of students are also African American and Latino. The emphasis of these school districts is to prevent academic failure. That is why their class sizes are smaller in the early grades.