FIX OUR MIDDLE SCHOOLS
DON'T PUNISH OUR STUDENTS

• In his most recent State of the City address, Mayor Bloomberg announced that low-scoring 8th graders will not be promoted to high school. The DOE will extend its policy of holding back students on the basis of test scores. 8th grade retention could result in as many as 18,000 students being held back.
• Holding students back is NOT the solution to improve our low performing middle schools.
• Research tells us that holding kids back is a formula for failure. It encourages dropouts. If a child is held over once the child is 50% more likely to drop out. If a child is held over twice, the child is 90% more likely to drop out.
• More than one hundred academics, researchers, and national experts on testing agree: retention leads directly to lower achievement and higher drop out rates.
• Our middle schools need fixing BUT not on the backs of our children!
• Children of eleven and twelve are not short seventeen year olds! They deserve schools that meet their developmental needs.
• We must reimagine our middle schools as environments that engage young adolescents with art, music, field trips, and hands on opportunities not the test prep factories they have become.
• Our middle school teachers deserve support to help turn their schools into professional communities which will provide challenging curriculum to prepare students for high schools of their choice.
• Our city's private schools, which are exempt from the city and state exams, offer engaging learning opportunities that tap children's interests and draw on their natural curiosity to make sense of their world. Our public school children deserve no less.