Summer school attendance is up significantly in Chicago and Baltimore; 60,000 to attend this year. (News Connection).

More than 29,000 of Chicago's 430,000 public school students are required to attend summer school this year before they can go on to the next grade, according to school officials. Baltimore faces virtually the same problem with about 30,000 students in mandatory summer school. The Maryland district, however, is much smaller than Chicago's, with about 90,000 total public school students.

In Chicago, about 4,000 more students than last year were required to attend summer school and all told, a total of about 245,000 students (including electives) are going to summer school in the Windy City this year. The 29,000 who are required to attend are in grades three, six and eight, and are doing so because they failed to score high enough on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills to be promoted, according to officials.

Promotion requirements were tougher for all grades in 2000-2001, officials say, so the increased number of students required to attend came as no surprise. "We raised the bar this year, so we knew this would happen," says Eve Hyatt, spokeswoman for the Chicago public school system.

For example, at the third-grade level, promotion standards were raised from 2.8 to 3.0 on the Iowa tests. Of 26,375 third graders tested, 5,721 failed to meet the requirements, but another 6,382--while meeting attendance and grade standards--also did not score well enough on the tests to warrant promotion, Hyatt told CURRICULUM ADMINISTRATOR.

The 11,355 third-graders attending summer school this year, or 43 percent of the class, is a record for Chicago, officials say. Each year, the city spends in excess of $30 million on summer school.

Roughly 9,900 sixth-graders and nearly ...