Once again, the state Department of Education and its school board are doing their best to make the new year’s reading and math tests as useless as possible.
The current practice of releasing “preliminary” test results in late August and “confirmed” results in November(!) is a diversionary tactic to cover up the concerns of public schools that provide poor care to children, especially minorities.
Children in grades 3 to 8 took nationwide math and English exams in the spring; machines can quickly evaluate the multiple-choice tests – yet SED only published the preliminary data Last weekand only to districts, not to parents.
According to the SED, this is intended to serve “to make instructional decisions and individual learning plans for students in the 2024-25 school year,” but it is far too late for that: the new school year begins in just under 10 days.
Mind you, they published it in Junebut under the current regime of the Regents it only happened in December.
This means that the SED (whether intentionally or because the bosses simply don’t care) makes the information useless for awarding internships or even evaluating the current curriculum.
If the Regents and the SED had wanted this information to be useful for anything relevant in the new school year, they would never have let the June release date pass.
Instead, state education bureaucrats have focused on making the information useless for anything but making schools look better: Over the past year, they have crafted new “learning standards” — that is, simplified assessment — to cover up the learning losses caused by extended COVID-related school closures and absurd remote learning.
This year, too, the SED is covering up the lack of performance by allowing the districts to provisional Reading and math results that they can market before the start of the new school year – because the final The assessments are probably even more dire.
Nevertheless, the preliminary results for grades 3 to 8 show the following proficiency rates: 46% in English (a decrease of 2 percentage points from the previous year) and 52% in mathematics (no change from 2023).
Incidentally, these first publications lack any data on English learners – so the public cannot learn anything about how the 36,000 “asylum seeker” children in New York City’s public schools are doing.
In addition, the results of charter schools are not reported separately, presumably because this would paint a poor picture of regular public schools.
But we do know that children at perhaps the best charter schools, the Success Academy network, achieved 82% proficiency rates in English and 95% in math. Maybe, just maybe, the other public schools in New York should try to copy Success’ curriculum, teaching methods, etc.?
But the state education bureaucrats despise Success (and charter schools in general). They’d rather let other kids keep struggling than admit that charter schools are on to a few things.
The welfare of children (or parents or taxpayers) is simply not important to the SED and its rulers; the smokescreens surrounding the tests prove it.
And if it were important to Governor Hochul and the politicians in Parliament, they would demand that the SED publish the final data on the state assessment by June 1 at the latest.
Rein in the anti-child education bureaucrats before they succeed in making standardized testing completely irrelevant—which undoubtedly seems to be their ultimate goal.