SED’s War on Education

Once again, the State Education Department is lowering standards for K-12 students — literally setting pandemic-related learning loss as the “new normal.” SED, the Times Union reports, is setting the bar for “proficiency” on state math and reading tests by using last year’s as the standard. That is, the achievements of kids who’d just suffered nearly two years of school shutdowns and the joke of “remote learning” are all the state bureaucracy will expect for the foreseeable future.

So much for the billions the state’s supposedly devoted to mitigating that learning loss.

Data from gold-standard National Assessment of Educational Progress exams show kids lost an average of as much as a full year of ground from the school shutdowns. And multiple studies show that lower-performing children lost even more ground than others. Yet SED’s reaction is to hide the evidence. And then try to talk the issue away. “Yes, there’s learning loss between 2019 and 2022, but in some ways we don’t want to keep going backwards,” Technical Advisory Committee Co-Chair Marianne Perie told the Board of Regents. “So for New York we are saying the new baseline is 2022.”

HUH?? That’s literally locking in the lost ground, the definition of going backward.

SED also says it’ll “re-norm” the US history Regents exam, with other Regents tests (once a national standard of excellence) doubtless to follow. This is nothing but rank dumbingdown of state testing, top to bottom.

Clearly, the State Education Department, under orders from the Board of Regents, has given up on serving students’ interests: The only winners from this disgrace are the adult “stakeholders” in the schools — mainly, the teachers unions.

Ultimate blame falls on Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who effectively appoints the Regents — and made a devil’s bargain with the teachers unions to become speaker. And under Democrats’ one-party rule of New York, no other power-player even dares to call him on it.