The state Department of Education and its board of education are once again doing everything in their power to make the new school year's reading and math tests as useless as possible.
The current practice of releasing “preliminary” test results in late August and “verified” results in November is a smokescreen to cover up public schools that are providing an inadequate education to children, especially minority children.
Children in grades 3 through 8 took the statewide math and English tests in the spring. Machines can quickly score the multiple-choice tests, but SED has only released preliminary data. last weektargeted only at districts, not parents.
SED says this is to “inform instructional decisions and individualized learning plans for students in the 2024-25 school year,” but it's too late now: The new semester is less than 10 days away.
In the past JuneBut under the current board structure, that will be delayed until December.
In other words, SED is (whether intentionally or because its superiors simply don't care) producing information that is not useful for evaluating student placement or current curriculum.
If the Board and SED had wanted this information to be useful for something relevant to the back to school year, they would never have pushed back the June release date.
Instead, state education officials have focused on making this information less useful beyond discrediting schools. Last year, they instituted new “learning standards” — simplified grading criteria — to hide the learning losses caused by the lingering pandemic school closures and farcical distance learning.
This year, SED continues to cover up the lack of results for districts. spare You can improve your reading and math skills before the new school year begins. final The ratings would likely be much more dire.
Still, preliminary results for grades 3 through 8 show 46% proficient in English (down 2 percentage points from last year) and 52% proficient in math (unchanged from 2023).
Incidentally, these initial releases omit any data on English language learners, leaving the public with no idea how the 36,000 “asylum seeker” children in New York City public schools are doing.
Also, charter school performance is not shown separately, presumably because doing so would undermine the reputation of regular public schools.
But we do know that students in the Success Academy network, arguably the best charter school, have an 82% proficiency rate in English and a 95% proficiency rate in math. Perhaps other New York public schools should try to emulate Success's curriculum, instructional methods, etc.
But state education officials despise Success (and charter schools in general). They'd rather allow other kids to continue to struggle than acknowledge that charter schools are working on some things.
SED and the Board do not have the best interests of children (or parents, or taxpayers) in mind at all, and the smokescreen of testing proves it.
And if Governor Hokel and state legislative leaders care, they will require SED to release final state assessment data by June 1st.
Anti-childhood education bureaucrats should be reined in before they render standardized testing completely irrelevant, which will surely be their ultimate goal.