Once again, the State Education Department and its Board of Regents masters are doing their level best to make a new year’s reading and math assessments as useless as possible.
The current practice of releasing “preliminary” test results in late August and “verified” results in November(!) is a smokescreen covering up public schools that are serving kids, especially minority ones, poorly.
Kids in grades 3-8 took statewide math and English Language Arts exams in the spring; machines can rapidly score the multiple-choice tests — yet SED only released the preliminary data last week, and only to districts, not parents.
SED says this is to “inform instructional decisions and individualized learning plans for students during the 2024-25 school year,” but it’s far too late for that: The new school term begins in just under 10 days.
Mind you, they used to release it in June, but under the current Regents’ regime, it’s been as late as December.
Meaning SED is (whether intentionally or because the bosses just don’t care) making the info useless for student placements and or even assessing the current curricula.
If the Regents and SED wanted this info to be useful for anything relevant to the new school year, they’d never have let the June release date slide.
Instead, the state educrats have focused on making the info less useful for anything except making schools look less bad: Last year, they crafted new “learning standards” — that is, dumbed down the scoring — to hide the learning loss caused by prolonged COVID school closings and farcical remote-learning.
This year, SED continues to paper over the lack of achievement by letting districts release preliminary reading and math scores they can spin before the new school term begins — because the final assessments are likely far more dismal.
Even so, the preliminary results for Grades 3-8 show proficiency rates of: 46% in English (a 2-percentage-point drop from last year) and 52% in math (no change from 2023).
These initial releases, by the way, leave out any data for English Language Learners — so the public can’t learn anything about how the 36,000 “asylum seeker” kids in NYC’s public schools are doing.
They also don’t show charter-school results separately, presumably because that’d make the regular public schools look bad.
But we do know that the kids at perhaps the best charters, the Success Academy network, racked up proficiency rates of 82% in English and 95% in math. Maybe, just maybe, New York’s other public schools should be looking to copy Success’ curriculum, instructional practices and so on?
But the state educrats despise Success (and charters generally). They’d rather let other kids continue to struggle than admit charters are on to a few things.
SED and the Regents simply don’t have children’s (or parents’, or taxpayers’) best interests in mind; the testing smokescreens prove it.
And if Gov. Hochul and the Legislature’s leaders cared, they’d require SED to release final state assessment data no later than June 1.
Rein in the anti-kid educrats before they manage to make standardized testing completely irrelevant — which sure looks to be their endgame.