NYC Passing Rates: 26% ELA, 30% Math

When you rig the exams to give you these kind of outcomes, well, these are the stats you get:

Large numbers of New York students failed reading and math exams last school year, education officials reported on Wednesday, unsettling parents, principals and teachers, and posing new challenges to a national effort to toughen academic standards. 

Across the city, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the state exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department.

...

Under the old exams last year, the city fared better: 47 percent of students passed in English, and 60 percent passed in math. 

Statewide, 31 percent of students passed the exams in reading and math. Last year, 55 percent passed in reading, and 65 percent in math. 

Some educators were taken aback by the steep decline and said they worried the figures would rattle the confidence of students and teachers. 

Chrystina Russell, principal of Global Technology Preparatory in East Harlem, said she did not know what she would tell parents, who will receive scores for their children in late August. At her middle school, which serves a large population of students from poor families, 6.8 percent of students were rated proficient in English, and 9.5 percent in math. Last year, those numbers were 31 percent and 44 percent, respectively. 

“Now we’re going to come out and tell everybody that they’ve accomplished nothing this year and we’ve been peddling backward?” Ms. Russell said. “It’s depressing.”

The purveyors of the Common Core gospel say these tests required deeper analysis and more creative problem-solving skills than the old exams, but as was shown back in April, really what they did is add a whole lot more questions and cut the time given to students to complete the exams.

This is why I have called for the NYSED and the Regents to release the state's 3rd-8th grade ELA and math exams, in their entirety, with the grading rubrics and scoring charts and other methodology, so that parents and the public can see for themselves how the game was rigged.

The education reform establishment in this state, indeed in the nation, wants to blow up the public school system as it is currently constituted and usher in a new era of charterization and privatization.

Raising the standards beyond what is developmentally appropriate for children, then giving more difficult exams with shorter time allotments based upon those standards before teachers were even given the curriculum to try and prepare students, are two of the tools the reformers are using to bring about their Ayn Randian future.

This game was rigged from the start to get to this day - as Rick Hess noted at his blog on Ed Week:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action.

This will apparently entail three steps:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing.

Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.)

Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."

Getting parents and the public to embrace "reform" in the suburbs would give reformers the tools they crave to close schools, fire unionized teachers, open charter schools, hire non-unionized at-will employees, and bring all the free market education goodness Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and parts of New York City are enjoying.

But in order to get suburban parents to embrace "reform," they have to convince parents the current state of these schools is abysmal and the current crop of teachers are "failures."

Today is the day that they start that argument, hawking these Common Core tests scores as evidence that drastic and disruptive solutions are needed to fix the problems in the system.

But really, they engineered this crisis and the drop in scores themselves.

You won't see that story in the NY Times or the other corporate-owned media (except for Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post, but that may soon end now that ed deformer Jeff Bezos owns the paper.)

But it is the truth.

Alas, in America, truth matters little.

Money, public relations, and power are what matter - and the deformers have all three on their side.