1 week Ago By Post Editorial Board
When Team Trump takes office, here’s hoping they — maybe with some help from Congress — have time to investigate the persistent, willful malfeasance of New York’s State Education Department . The feds sure have standing, given all the cash Uncle Sam spends on education in New York, and they can start with SED’s conspicuous efforts to hide basic information from parents and the public, as witness last week’s so-called release of info on state assessment tests for grades 3-8. Kids took the exams back in April and May; machines can score them quickly, and SED used to release the results over the summer.
But the educrats in recent years have pushed the release ever-later; this year they made the final results public on Nov. 14. As the government watchdogs at the Empire Center noted , this is the third straight year that SED didn’t drop the data until well into the next school year.
Even earlier, partial releases to schools came too late for the data to be of much use. And the “final” release came in a format that made it difficult to, say, compare the results for regular public schools with the ones from public charter schools. The educrats did their best to make the test results impossible to access, much less understandable by parents and the general public.
The Empire Center, with far fewer resources than SED, has made the data searchable by school, school district, county and school type. Even then, it’s tricky to compare scores with past years’ results because SED keeps changing what counts as “proficiency.” Of course, SED and its masters on the state Board of Regents basically hate standardized testing in good part because it can give parents and the public independent information on school quality and the (poor) state of public education in New York.
Chief SED flack J.P. O’Hare had the chutzpah to claim that the agency released preliminary individual student test scores in August for programming, instructional services and parent engagement , e.
g., to “inform conversations [parents can have] with their child’s teacher about how their child is progressing in their grade level” — except that by August the kid has already been promoted another grade. Even with scoring standards watered down (yet again), fewer than half of all kids statewide in grades 3 through 8 scored proficient or above in English, and math scores were not much better.
New York public schools spend well over $35 billion a year — nearly $30,000 per student — leading the nation in “input” even as the results are just middling. Fed-up families are fleeing the regular public schools for private schools, charters and even homeschooling. And the Democratic scalawags who control the state Legislature will never look into any of this: They’re the ones who choose the Regents and so tell SED what to do.
That leaves standing up for New York’s kids to the Trump team, or perhaps the Republican Congress: Please, guys, send help!.
