GABRIEL OPPENHEIM: Helping the child who is left behind

Two weeks ago, Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City Public Schools system, sent an e-mail about testing to reporters. It was an unusual move, because in past years Klein had held a press conference to boast of jumps in student scores. But the 2006 numbers told a different story: More than 8,900 fifth-graders may be held back because they failed reading and writing exams.

And that doesn't make for a good press conference.

It also doesn't make for a good argument. In January 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had argued that tougher promotion rules would increase students' scores and better their education. So he announced the end of "social promotion," the euphemism for allowing students who fail to advance a grade. It worked. Fewer students were held back and scores rose -- mostly because Bloomberg committed $40 million to remedial classes on Saturdays and during the summer for students at risk of failing.

"We have charts that show a real connection between Saturday sessions children attended and how they performed," said Lori Mei, the city's testing director, in The New York Times.

For a while, New York praised Bloomberg's reform. But one e-mail changed all that. As Klein wrote, more than 8,900 fifth-graders -- comprising 15.2 percent of the grade -- may fail to earn promotion this year if they don't pass an August re-test.

To put that in perspective, only 5,450 students failed to earn promotion last year, or 8.6 percent of those subject to the mayor's promotion rules. So the number of failing fifth-graders has markedly increased, as have Bloomberg's critics.

The group Time Out from High Stakes Testing called the mayor's policy a "sham" with results that no one "would validate or find reliable." One blogger added, "8,900 fifth graders are about to be branded failures because of the stupidity and hubris of know-nothing politicians."

I get the anger. A year ago, it seemed that city kids were finally on the right track. Now, it seems another policy has failed. But to fling "stupidity and hubris" is to reduce a complex problem into meaningless rhetoric.

After all, one reason more fifth-graders failed this year is the test itself, which was redesigned by the state and administered three months earlier than it used to be. The new test can't be compared with last year's. Plus, those three months translate to 12 Saturday sessions that students could have attended, had the test been given later.

And the number of students failing to earn promotion dropped by a cumulative 7,000 in the third and seventh grades. So it appears Bloomberg's tactics are working at other elementary school levels.

Besides, "social promotion" is hardly as simple an issue as the critics claim. On the one hand, studies suggest that holding kids back makes them more likely to drop out while barely helping them academically.

On the other hand, promoting unready students hurts our government and our students. In New York, the state spends $29 million a year in financial aid for 13,000 students who never graduated from high school (or received an equivalency degree) to attend college.

To be fair, these students must pass a federal Department of Education test before they can receive aid. But state officials have said the test isn't rigorous and have caught college employees cheating on students' tests to help them pass.

That's the scam: Commercial colleges often accept unqualified applicants for the financial aid they'll garner and then boot the students after they've failed a class. Still, greater harm comes to promoted students, many of whom are serious about earning degrees and starting careers.

This became clear to me last summer, when I taught a free SAT class to rising juniors from Mount Vernon High School. Located 20 minutes north of the city, Mount Vernon is better known for producing Chicago Bulls hoopster Ben Gordon than for its dismal classes, where social promotion still exists and scores remain low.

All of my seven students said they'd like to be lawyers or in business. And all of them believed they were qualified. But sadly, most could barely write a coherent sentence; one student wrote an entire one-page essay without any punctuation. When I said that wouldn't earn high SAT marks, the students said their school thought otherwise.

They were set up to fail later in life.

It's time to end social promotion. That doesn't necessarily mean holding kids back but rather sinking money into remedial programs that prevent students from failing in the first place. The risk of being held back has to be real, but that doesn't mean branding children "failures."

It means letting them know what to improve now, before it's too late.

Guest columnist Gabriel Oppenheim is a College sophomore from Scarsdale, N.Y. His e-mail address is rg@sas.upenn.edu.

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