Passing the test
Give U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona an A: He says what he means and means what he says. After telling states that they could get flexibility on administering standardized tests but could not sidestep federal requirements altogether — making clear that the Biden administration wants to try to identify COVID-produced backsliding in student learning in order to correct it — his department denied New York State’s request to give schools a broad waiver from state exams for the second straight year. The pandemic will not become a blanket excuse to unravel assessments designed to ensure that students, and especially disadvantaged ones, are learning.
Wednesday, declaring themselves “deeply disappointed” in the feds’ decision, state Regents Chancellor Lester Young and Education Commissioner Betty Rosa claimed that inequities in who’ll get the exams — primarily kids who are already attending school, as fully remote students will generally be exempt — render all results meaningless.
In fact, so scattershot has education become over the past two years, with the biggest instructional hurdles being thrown in the path of the kids who need the most help, any indicator of actual academic achievement is bound to be deeply informative.
Begrudgingly, New York’s top educrats say they will go ahead with the tests, while being committed to “providing as much flexibility as possible” within U.S. Education Department requirements. Mathematics and English Language Arts exams for third-through-eighth graders will be shorter, and a bare minimum number of Regents Exams will be given. Nor will test results be used for any high-stakes decisions made by the state, which is perfectly consistent with what the feds are asking.
Cardona and President Biden know knowledge is power. They know that unreliable early indicators suggest students have been falling behind, with achievement gaps acrossracesandethnicgroupsgrowing.Evenwiththenew state budget set to spend deliver schools billions of additional funding, New York has no hope of fixing a problem it refuses to diagnose. Start sharpening those No. 2 pencils.