Explain This

New DOE policy:

The Department of Education plans to change the policy requiring students who fail state tests to pass summer school or repeat a grade level.

Officials expect a lot more students will fail the state standardized tests this year, and so to keep the summer school numbers and retention numbers from skyrocketing, they are changing the rules.
The city will only require elementary and middle school students whose scores are in the bottom 10 percent go to summer school and pass, meaning some students may fail the high stakes exams and get to move on anyway.

The state tests, which are brand-new this year, are supposed to be a better measure of what students should actually know at each grade level in order to be ready for college-level work when they graduate from high school.. and officials say they will be much more difficult to pass.

Starting in 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted a strict policy that all students who fail must attend summer school and pass in order to be promoted, calling anything else "social promotion."

If the APPR teacher evaluation system were in place this current year, you could have students scoring very low on these vaunted new Common Core tests (which, since they're developed by Pearson, will probably suck as badly as last year's Pearson and the Hare tests), be passed along for the next grade despite Bloomberg's Social Promotion Ban, but have their teachers declared "ineffective" for not "adding value" to their test scores.

Despite the best efforts of the Asshats4Educators and other ed deformers, APPR is not in place yet, so fortunately no teacher will be held accountable for these test scores.

But make no mistake - had APPR been in place, you would have had Walcott, Tisch and King call for mass firings of teachers who hadn't "added value" to their students scores on these Common Core tests, which, if the media reports are to be believed, the education brain trust at the NYSED, the Regents and Tweed believe will fall at least 30%.