Grad Delusion
Educrats can’t educate — and want to hide it
GOOD morning, students, it’s time to help you learn less and graduate all the same. That is the proposal the New York State Education Department just presented to the Board of Regents: To graduate from high school, students would no longer need to pass five Regents exams but could demonstrate their “learning” through alternative “assessments.”
What’s amazing is that it took a 64-member Blue Ribbon Commission more than a year to come up with this brilliant, groundbreaking innovation in education: Just dumb down standards, give everyone a shiny diploma, and we can congratulate ourselves for “improving outcomes.”
And do it “equitably” so we can stop having to deal with politically embarrassing “achievement gaps.” What’s not to like?
The Russians, who have a long history of suffering governments that lie to them, would call such a piece of paper a “Potemkin diploma.”
The Chinese, who have an even longer history of suffering governments that lie to them, have a more cynical meme to describe such travesty: “the thief covering his own ears while stealing the ringing bell.”
Educrats are not fooling anyone. Not in creating watered-down “pathways” to graduation, not in merging distinct diploma types that document different levels of academic achievement into a single diploma that hides the dumbing down, despite any added pretty “seals and endorsements,” not in painting profusely that “equity” lipstick on a dumbed-down-diploma pig.
That the educracy has resorted to such transparent scams proves that our educrats can’t educate.
And they can’t educate at $38,000 per student per year, which in any honest world would constitute a major fraud.
As for the union teachers, with the latest contract raising the maximum annual salary to $151,271 by 2026, it’s not a bad living for not being able to teach.
Between retirement and health-care benefits not subject to New York City or state taxes (yes, you read that right), a Big Apple union teacher who makes it to retirement is effectively a multimillionaire; a worker in the wealth-producing private sector would have to save up several million dollars to be able to enjoy the same stream of retirement and health-care benefits from his savings, and that’s assuming his savings earn a hefty 5.9% pre-tax (at more realistic rates of return and higher future tax rates, which are surely coming, the savings required have to be even bigger).
New York City’s education staffers don’t do shabbily either; even when they are kicked upstairs for mismanagement, they can make $220,000 per year.
The dumbing down is not just in making diploma requirements meaningless.
It’s also in undermining rigorous admissions, watering down curricula, ditching demanding courses and, if all else fails, outright grade fraud, all with predictable consequences.
This is what government-run monopolies give us: ever more incompetent and corrupt “elites” producing ever worse products at ever higher costs packaged in ever fancier lies.
The most families can do is vote with their feet, which they are doing aplenty.
They flee union public schools for charter schools, parochial schools, private schools, home schools — or they just abandon the city altogether.
We in New York City are where we are because of the politicians we elected; these electeds enabled this $37.5 billion public-schools fraud upon us, plus other failures.
Change starts from the voting booth.
That New York City has turned around once, under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and their City Councils, was a miracle.
Cities that have failed — Newark, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee — went only one way once they started on that path: down.
Will New York City voters repeat its miracle once more, or will we watch New York City go the way of those other cities?
Students, you have your homework.