CUNY’s Giant Step Back

I t looks like the City University of New York is inching back to the bad old days of low or non-existent standards — which will help obscure the failure of the city’s regular public schools. Specifically, as Politico reports, CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez admits the system is moving away from testing new students into remedial-education courses. Right now, remedial ed in math and/or English is mandatory if the freshman hasn’t achieved certain scores on state Regents exams, the SAT or the ACT; about three in four of entering community-college students wind up having to take at least one remedial course.

Critics charge that “excessive” remedial requirements are why only about one-infive CUNY students in a two-year program finishes within three years. Surely, the fact that so many of the kids start off unprepared to do community-college-level work has something to do with it.

Those same critics call the exams “highstakes,” a term now thrown at any testing that matters. And they’re pushing a ridiculous replacement measure: high-school grades. S orry: Far too many city schools practice social promotion — passing kids when they haven’t even begun to master their coursework, simply so the principal and staff can brag of higher graduation rates.

We don’t deny that there’s a problem here: Remedial students have to use limited financial-aid resources on classes that don’t actually earn them college credit. That’s particularly pernicious if they take out loans but never get a degree that will help them earn enough to pay off that debt.

CUNY, meanwhile, is committed to accepting into community college any highschool grad who applies. But if it starts letting students take even entry-level courses that they lack the skills for, professors will either have to flunk a lot of kids, or adopt their own social-promotion policies. Y et then these degrees won’t mean anything — even for the kids that pass legitimately. Employers and colleges outside the CUNY system will quickly learn to ignore the empty credential.

And still-unprepared students who move on to a four-year CUNY program will pose the same problems all over again — quite possibly triggering another round of social promotion and the collapse in value of a CUNY four-year degree.

CUNY has better options, some of which it’s already trying, such as improving and intensifying its remedial programs, giving those students more support and so on. Killing the messenger is a terrible mistake.

Tellingly, the critics claim that high-school grades are a better indicator of which students need to do remedial work. That might be true for high schools that issue honest diplomas, but the sad fact is that both the city and state Departments of Education are now watering down those standards. S adly, CUNY’s been to this dance before: It took years of tough reforms in the 1990s to pull the system out of mediocrity. It’s heartbreaking to see it begin to cycle back down.

The only folks who benefit from these trends are administrators and “educators” who care more about continuing to collect their paychecks than about teaching young people the skills and knowledge they need to soar in later life.