NYC Held Back 0.4% of Students in Grades 3-8 Last Year. 40% Failed the Tests.

New York City spent $40 billion educating its public school students in 2024. That's $36,293 per pupil, roughly double the national average of $17,619, according to a report from the Success Academy charter school network.

Only 0.4% of students in grades 3 through 8 were held back last year, according to the city Department of Education. Meanwhile more than 40% of those same students failed standardized reading and math tests, the New York Post reported.

Around 3% of students didn't meet the requirements to advance. Most moved on to the next grade anyway.

"This is educational malpractice," Jean Hahn, co-president of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum Education, told the Post.

The Numbers Behind Social Promotion

The practice is called social promotion, moving kids forward regardless of whether they've mastered the material. It's not new, but the scale of the gap between failure rates and retention rates is stark.

Back in 2010, when the city had 990,000 students enrolled, 1.15% were held back. From 2021 through 2025, the retention rate for fifth through eighth graders dropped to 0.3%, according to a DOE spokesperson.

The shift traces back to Chancellor's Regulation A-501, implemented in 2014 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. It let schools use "holistic criteria" beyond standardized tests, including report card grades, to determine whether a student had met math and language proficiency standards.

A DOE spokesperson defended the grading system, saying course grades are "designed to reflect students' demonstrated mastery of those standards, not simply attendance, behavior, or time spent in class," and that students must meet course expectations to earn credit.

Zilvenas Silenas, president of the Empire Center, isn't buying that the official numbers tell the full story. "I suspect the real picture is worse," he said.

The Success Academy Report

The retention numbers landed alongside a separate, much larger report. A July report from Success Academy, titled "By Any Honest Measure: New York City's Long Record of School Failure and the Price We Keep Paying," found that 906 of the city's public schools, nearly half the total, failed to get a majority of students passing state math or reading exams last year.

Those 906 schools enroll 409,379 students, or 43% of all New York City public school children, according to the report. In 503 of those schools, the majority of students failed both math and reading.

Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz, a former chair of the City Council's education committee, called it "the most complete accounting of school failure in New York City ever assembled," according to the Washington Free Beacon. The report runs 35 pages with 11 appendices, and Success Academy says its staff spent months analyzing state accountability data going back to 2012 alongside city expenditure files and test results.

The report's language is blunt: "Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls... No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way."

A third of the failing schools have been on the state's academic failure list since 2012, the earliest year state accountability data was tracked, according to the report.

The report pointedly avoids making this about Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office January 1, 2026. He's mentioned by name only once, and the report frames the failure as one that "has persisted for decades" across multiple administrations. This is not a single mayor's mess. It spans de Blasio, Eric Adams, and now Mamdani.

One School, One Complaint at a Time

The pattern shows up at the ground level too. Flushing High School in Queens is under investigation by New York City Public Schools after teachers alleged students are passed even after failing math courses and exams, according to the Washington Examiner, citing reporting from QNS.

A New York City Public Schools spokesperson confirmed to QNS the agency is "actively investigating this specific math grading issue." Under Flushing's math department grading policy, a student who scores a 1 out of a possible 0-to-4 scale still receives a 65, a passing grade, teachers told QNS.

Teachers said roughly 30% of Flushing students pass the state Regents exams, yet about 70% are still pushed toward graduation. "It just seems like expectations have become lower," one teacher said. Flushing's average ACT score is 22 out of 36, according to Niche, which rates the school an overall C.

The Center Square reported it reached out to Flushing High School and NYC Public Schools for further comment and had not received a response.

The Enrollment Problem Nobody's Solved

None of this is happening in a growing system. The DOE has lost 12.2% of its student body in four years, and enrollment dropped by 22,000 students in 2025 alone, a 2.4% decline, the steepest in four years, according to the Post.

The city's own state test data claims progress. New York State Education Department figures for 2024-2025 showed 57% of third-through-eighth graders proficient in math and 53% in English language arts, statistics the state itself called "meaningful signs of improvement."

That leaves an open question the DOE hasn't answered publicly: if grading and promotion decisions aren't following the test results, what standard are schools actually using to decide who's ready for the next grade? The Flushing investigation may produce an answer for one school. Whether it changes policy citywide is still unresolved.