The Statute Nobody Mentioned: How a State Law Became One Mayor's Choice

The New York Post says Bill de Blasio "allowed" NYC schools to stop using test scores to decide promotion. A 2014 New York State law had already required it.

Verdict: mostly-false. Truth score 0.30. Confidence 0.85.

On July 25, 2026, the Post reported that NYC promotes nearly 100% of students in grades 3-8 while about 40% score below proficiency, and attributed the shift to a mayoral choice. NYS Education Law § 305(47), enacted in Governor Cuomo's FY2014-15 budget as a headline element of the Common Core Implementation Reform Act, directs that no district may make promotion decisions "solely or primarily" on grades 3-8 state ELA and math assessments. The same constraint sits in the Commissioner's Regulations and binds every district in the state. Chancellor's Regulation A-501 was reissued 6/2/2014 — after the statute, not before it.

The steelman: the law bans tests as the primary factor, not retention. A city that wanted more holdovers could set demanding course thresholds and staff portfolio review rigorously. NYC's 0.4% retention rate is a real number and no statute compelled it, and A-501's design was a local document. That is a defensible criticism — and a different claim from the one the Post printed, in a piece that never cites the statute.

We also check the headline's "despite" framing (mostly-false, 0.30) and Manhattan Institute fellow Danyela Egorov's claim that the policy leaves students struggling in college math and reading (mostly-false, 0.25). The remedy implied — retention — was measured here, on these children, and the article never says so. The strongest evidence in Egorov's direction is Florida's third-grade policy, and we give it its due.

One thing we could not settle: the 0.4% and 3% retention figures are DOE-provided and we located no published dataset that reproduces them.