I smell a rat. And not one of the ones you see on many streets on a lovely New York evening.
I mean the announcement by officials that proficiency rates in math and reading in New York City schools have gone up.
City officials celebrated the news as a sign that students are getting back their educational mojo since the pandemic.
The Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education even welcomed the news as “extremely encouraging.”
There’s just a few problems with this.
The first is that the figures are a crock from the get-go. You can’t test exam rates at this point in the year.
Something that the officials in question know very well.
I would guess that they also know that the data will only be able to be gone over by experts when they are released in December.
That is — after the local elections. Which might strike a cynic as highly convenient.
Of course education officials are rightly embarrassed by last year’s test scores.
Because those results showed a sharp fall-off of students’ overall performance. In 2022 fewer than 38% of 3rd through 8th graders were proficient in math.
That is compared with 46% before the pandemic. Those aren’t the sort of figures that officials like to see. People — especially parents — might notice.
So what did they do? Well they moved the goalposts of course. State education officials actually admitted after last year’s results that they were planning to adopt “new standards” in testing across grades.
And if you think that these “new standards” are better standards and not simply aimed at making the tests easier — and results better — then I might suggest a Nigerian goldmine for you to invest in.
And even if you believed these claims, just look at what officials are actually celebrating.
The apparently wonderful news is that half of New York city children passed math and reading tests to a “proficient” level. That isn’t to a superb level, or to a world-beating level. It isn’t that they passed to the kind of level you need your students to be at if America is going to remain competitive as a world economy.
No — the city is meant to be celebrating that 50% of kids have a basic ability to read and a basic ability to add up. So don’t pop the champagne open just yet.
Doing all this is just such a range of dishonest tactics. All to cover over the fact that despite having the highest spend per pupil of anywhere in the country, New York City schools are failing.
Yet there is something that even this dishonesty cannot cover over. If the city is so worried — as they should be — about the effects of COVID of students then they can address them.
But the most serious effect of all is not the half of the city’s children who can’t read or write. It is the thousands of children who will now probably never have the chance.
Because as of earlier this year it was estimated that almost 60,000 pupils have just gone missing from the school system. This isn’t students who moved out of state. They’re accounted for.
And it isn’t made up of pupils who moved to private schools or went into home-schooling. Again that is accounted for.
This is simply 60,000 pupils who have just gone missing from the education system altogether.
They will probably now never get the opportunity to get an education — even the failing education — that this city affords. And that should be a source of shame to this city and its bureaucrats.
It is something that should cause deep embarrassment and a state-wide effort to address the problem.
Yet I don’t see that happening. It seems that we are content with the lost pupils remaining lost.
As for the rest of the city’s students — well as this week’s results show, they will continue to be guinea-pigs for perhaps the most incompetent education provision of any developed country.
There are students in Africa educated to a far better standard than the children of New York. And for a fraction of a fraction of the price.
Everyone from the President on down talks about the importance of education.
Everybody knows that a good education is the best chance any child has of making a success of their life.
So why are we so bad at it?
And why do New York voters keep allowing the wool to be pulled over our eyes so blatantly and so ineptly?
Watch Dems change their tune on the Wall
I am always intrigued by how things change depending on which party is doing it.
Perhaps President Biden should be praised for his late realization that this nation needs a wall at its southern border.
Now we can expect all but the most extreme Democrats to dutifully fall in line behind him.
And just like that a wall that used to be racist and wrong when Donald Trump was doing it will become virtuous and right because Joe Biden is doing it.
I marvel at these cases. Remember the Trump “cages” that the left insisted the then President was incarcerating illegals in.
For weeks on end the left went into a meltdown, claiming that there was now essentially no difference between America and Nazi Germany.
Only for the magical discovery that Barack Obama’s administration had used precisely the same detention techniques and that none of them had been condemned by the same people.
Trump cages equalled bad. Obama cages equalled fair and virtuous.
It’s the same on issue after issue. Democrats like Mayor Adams now say things on immigration that Donald Trump would have been destroyed for.
So let me make a projection of the next policy to transform in this mysterious manner.
As murder and violence on our city’s streets gets worse I think we might hear an increasing number of Democrats saying things that Republicans have been saying for years.
But it’ll be in a nice way, obviously, and it’ll be right coming from them, for some reason.
