Superintendent Mayo sets tough new standards

JULIA TIERNAN/YH HEAD OF THE CLASS: New Haven Superintendent Reginald Mayo will set stricter standards for grade promotion in the city's public schools.

New Haven Board of Education Superintendent Reginald Mayo believes in setting goals. That's why his office has printed up a series of pamphlets called, "What every student will learn in...." Color-coded by grade, the pamphlets lay out goals for the progress of all 20,300 students in the city's public school system. While some of the targets are rather vague, some are more specific: in the second grade, "students will choose and read 25 books."

Unfortunately, reaching education goals is more difficult than printing them in these pamphlets. The recently released results of the fall 1998 state mastery test show that only 19 percent of New Haven's fourth graders can read at grade level--far below the state average of 54 percent.

Mayo blames this enormous gap between goals and reality on a phenomenon he calls "social promotion." This term describes the practice of allowing students to advance to the next grade level when, by any objective measure, they are not ready. Mayo finds this practice reprehensible. In his seven years as superintendent, he has witnessed social promotion but has so far been unable to stop it.

"Why should we send a youngster on to middle school who can't read?" Mayo said. "Why should we send a youngster on to high school who can't read? What's going to happen to the youngster? He's going to drop out. And if he stays in school, it's going to be a problem. Most of our high-school books start on at least an eighth-grade reading level. You send a kid there reading on a third- or fourth-grade reading level, and he's going to flunk out."

While holding students back early on may discourage some, Mayo believes it is clearly preferable to suffering the consequences of leniency in grade promotion. "I think what it's going to do is help them later on, because if they know how to read, they have a better shot of staying in school," he said. "I'd rather deal with them down there then try to deal with them in ninth grade, because in ninth grade they're very, very embarrassed."

Mayo is not the first to speak against promoting elementary school students who cannot read to the next grade. And he admits that his fight against the practice has so far been a losing battle. "We've had a promotion policy before, but no one really follows it," he said. "Now we're putting some teeth in this policy. We're going to enforce this policy, even though it's going to mean that kids are going to be retained."

Over the next two years, Mayo plans to phase in a program that will keep students in the third grade until they can read at grade level. The 1999-2000 school year will be a transitional "grace period," as Mayo calls it--students can advance to the fourth grade as long as they read at second grade level or above. The school board approved the plan in January, and soon Mayo will be able to test his plan, which is the first of its kind in Connecticut, to his knowledge.

The largest school district in the nation has recently decided to follow New Haven's example. New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew announced on Tues., Feb. 23, that summer school would be mandatory for third, sixth, and eighth graders who do poorly on standardized citywide reading and math tests and in their academic classes.

According to the Council of the Great City Schools, 22 of the 53 largest school districts in the country now have mandatory summer school policies. Three quarters of these have adopted the policy in the last three years.

Mayo stresses that New Haven students will be forced to repeat a year only as a last resort. He has already put in place a number of preventive measures to ensure that students who are in danger of being held back have a chance to catch up. These include voluntary Saturday Academies, where third graders and a few fourth graders learn reading; workshops for parents to learn how to get involved with their children's education; and, most stressed by Mayo, a
program to reacquaint teachers with the ins and outs
of teaching reading.

"Most people get only one course on how to teach reading throughout a whole career of education!" Mayo said. "I mean, one course! So many of them forget. Many of them start missing the little techniques that are so important for our young people. Many start taking shortcuts. So for some it's a refresher kind of thing, others it's that they didn't pick up what they should have picked up in that one course that they had in reading."

Mayo, who feels strongly that students should be retained based on a standardized test score, was himself not a good standardized test taker in high school and college. But he said the current mastery tests are very different from the tests he struggled with. "When I was coming along, most of them were achievement-type tests," he said. "You either knew the knowledge or you didn't. And you could guess at it. Most of them were multiple-choice type questions--certainly not like the mastery tests these youngsters are taking today."

While Mayo believes the Connecticut mastery tests are better than most standardized tests, he pointed out that no exam can predict a student's true aptitude for success. During his own experience with these tests, others occasionally outperformed Mayo. "When I was in college, I saw them every day," he said. "Oh man, they'd take a standardized test and boy, they were the greatest in the world. But I'm a lot further ahead than most of those folks now."

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