As the old saying goes, “If you don’t give them the stick to beat you with to begin with…” That’s probably the reason behind this reticence shown by the State of New York to release last year’s public school test scores. Schmaybe they haven’t worked out a duck-and-cover schmeme yet – who knows.

The only possible explanations are general mismanagement and incompetence at the department in getting the data ready to release – which is not at all hard to imagine – or that the data is so truly awful, building on a truly awful prior year, that they are looking for the exits rather than just getting it over with (might be a paywall).

At a time when New York public school students are struggling with the effects of learning losses during Covid shutdowns, the state education department is facing criticism for delaying the release of student test scores, a crucial guide for educational performance.

As schools prepare for the fourth full academic year since the pandemic, plummeting academic performances represent the “new normal,” as the co-chairwoman of New York’s Technical Advisory Committee, Marianne Perie, put it at a Board of Regents meeting in March.

New York ranks 46th in the nation for fourth-grade math and has demonstrated “no meaningful improvement” in fourth- or eighth-grade reading or math scores for more than a decade, according to the State Education Department’s statement from 2022.

School shutdowns during the pandemic only compounded these learning setbacks. A report by Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in March showed that younger students in New York State performed far worse than the national average between 2019 and 2022.

Okay – stop, stop, STOP RIGHT THERE.

NY state schools have shown “no meaningful improvement” in 4th or 8th grade reading or math scores in over ten years. And this is a state that is on its way to spending an average of $32,000 a year per child – per child. What in the Sam Hell are they doing with all this money?

…Public elementary and secondary school spending in New York rose to $26,571 per pupil in 2020-21, according to the latest Census Bureau data—setting a new record high even as pupil performance was falling amid the disruption of in-person learning due to pandemic restrictions.

…As measured by federal data, New York’s $1,053 increase in per-pupil school spending over the 2019-20 level represented something of a pause in advance of massive state “foundation aid” increases to school districts, which began to flow the following year. With New York’s total public school enrollment continuing to decline, its K-12 education outlays have surged since 2021-22. New York’s latest school property report cards, covering districts outside the state’s five largest cities, point to spending levels of nearly $32,000 per pupil in 2023-24—and the big cities are likely to spend at least as much if not more.

For being well-paid teachers – and remember these are 2020-21 figures – compared to their neighboring peers, the children don’t seem to be benefiting, do they?

• New York’s high spending level was driven primarily by instructional salaries and benefits—which, at $18,402 per pupil, were 111 percent above the national average of $8,728, the census data show. New York’s spending in this category (i.e., money in the classroom) exceeded the total per-pupil school spending of all but six other states and the District of Columbia.

So how does the state intend to right this wrong? Get those test scores higher, get kids on the right track? Get teachers teaching what the kids need to learn to, like, read proficiently for the rest of their lives?

NY’s taking the easiest way possible.

Rejigger the test thresholds using the low scores from the past awful couple of pandemic years and make the lows the new highs.

It’s brilliant.

Everyone will come out smelling like roses…except the kids that can’t read and make change from a $10 bill at McDonald’s.

…The education department is using test scores from the 2021-22 academic year — the worst in the state’s history — as the basis for lowering proficiency thresholds on state assessments. As part of New York’s overhaul of academic standards, to be completed by 2025, these new standards artificially elevate student performance.

“They’re resetting the benchmark every two, three years to obfuscate their failure,” the co-founder of an education center that advocates for academic rigor in K-12 public schools, Place NYC, and a mother of two children who attended public schools, Yiatin Chu, tells the Sun.

The state also wants to take science exams out of the process for elementary school students and exclude social studies scores for high schoolers. They cited shifting exam year schedules and altogether cancelled exams in their excuses.

…While calling it a “logical” move, Ed-Trust argued that excluding science tests “undermines the importance of science education” and worried schools will have less reason to focus on it. The organization suggested that the state should instead work with local districts to “ensure a smooth transition” to the new science assessments without entirely removing it as one way to measure student performance.

On the high school level, officials want to pause using social studies tests because of multiple exam cancellations in recent years. The state looks at cohorts of students, such as the graduating class of 2023, when considering how they performed on these tests, namely the Regents exams for Global History and Geography and U.S. History and Government.

It also means you can’t compare progress – or lack thereof – from year to year because the metrics are always shifting and changing, sliding ever downward towards the lowest common denominator…a term which these children will never know the definition of.

Think about it – next year they’ll have all those illegal migrant children dumped into the system to use as an excuse for skewing the data yet again.

It’s brilliant.

Democrats, hardcore liberals, and teachers’ unions.

But that’s okay, because the teachers will keep those schweet union jobs, while the “data” will reflect their professional success. Governor Kathy Hochul can brag about how her enlightened administration has clawed the state’s educational standing out of the national toilet.

Everyone but the kids win.