The city Department of Education will double the number of students it sends to summer school this year compared to 2009 — a function, it says, of tougher standards on the state tests on which the assignment is based.
But are they tougher?
That remains to be seen.
Yes, the state Education Department and its governing body, the Board of Regents, say they’re making progress: This year’s tests covered more subject material, a state official says, and the Regents allegedly are trying to raise the score needed to qualify as “proficient.”
But, as The Post revealed this month, students can get credit for wrong answers if they make halting attempts to “show their work” — and there is no indication that will soon change.
Plus, state testing director David Abrams — the veteran bureaucrat responsible for years of grade inflation — still has his job.
Shockingly, both Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and her hand-picked education commissioner, David Steiner, express full confidence in Abrams.
“David Abrams is a valued member of New York’s assessment team,” they told The Post in a prepared statement.
Even more worrisome is the admission by Howard Everson — a Fordham professor who chairs the state Education Department’s group of testing advisers — that “political” considerations help determine how proficiency-test minimum, or “cut,” scores are set.
“[If] there was a steady change in the number of non-English-speaking children in the school system,” he says, “then the Regents may revisit the cut scores to ask, ‘Is this test too difficult for the student body?’ ”
Which is another way of asking, “Will these test scores be too embarrassing to the Education Department and the Regents?” — when the relevant question needs to be, “Does the student body know enough to be promoted to the next grade?”
True enough, rookie Education Commissioner Steiner says he’s committed to toughening standards.
But to do that, he must clear away years of bureaucratic undergrowth — and his allegiance to David Abrams, et al., suggests he’s being absorbed into the department’s bureaucratic blob.
Certainly, Steiner needs to be especially vigilant against political meddling.
In that regard, it doesn’t help that his patron, Merryl Tisch, is entirely too close to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — who, after all, appointed her to the Regents chancellorship in the first place.
Steiner, if he’s to bring about real reform, needs to create a rigorous testing process that is uncompromising, transparent, consistent and readily comprehensible to outsiders. We wish him well, but our hopes are not high.