Technically speaking, New York state Education Commissioner John King was correct when he insisted last week that “we are not retreating” on school standards. So true — it’s more like a surrender.
King’s attempt to put a happy face on the rout was wishful thinking, as the parade of white flags reveals. The commissioner has been admirably bold in pushing onward, but now marches mostly alone.
From Albany to City Hall, the education-reform movement is grinding to a halt. Meaningful teacher evaluations and standardized tests for students are either on hold or moving into the mushy world of educrat gobbledygook, where vapid self-esteem is prized more than real results.
To be sure, the collapse didn’t happen all at once. It recalls the Ernest Hemingway dialogue in “The Sun Also Rises.”
When a man asks, “How did you go bankrupt?” another answers, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
So it is with the collapse of standards. What started as a trickle is now a gusher wiping away the tentative progress on accountability.
The biggest blow came with an innocuous-sounding press release from city Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. She announced a new promotion policy for grades 3 through 8 that “takes the temperature down around testing” while allowing “educators to make decisions about the students they know best while maintaining high standards.”
In plain English, that means that even if tests show Johnny can’t read, we’re giving him a gold star and sending him on to the next grade, where he’ll fall further behind before being passed on again. That’s the gist of social promotion, and it’s now official city policy.
Mayor de Blasio later boasted of the move, saying, “We’re going to in every way we can move away from high-stakes testing.”
Presumably, that means he favors low-stakes testing, which is testing that doesn’t matter. Welcome to the new mayor’s education plan, where he’ll be able to claim victory because failure has been outlawed.
Sadly, Gotham isn’t alone. Across the state, too many students and too many teachers couldn’t measure up to tougher standards, so the bar is being lowered or stashed in the closet.
Things were not exactly hunky-dory before, with dumbed-down tests, credit-recovery scams and outright cheating contributing to soaring graduation rates. Virtually every teacher was considered good enough for government work, even as rigorous national tests showed local students making minimal gains.
To their credit, King and the Board of Regents admitted the state system was full of misleading and bogus data and moved to tighten the rules.
They also joined the Common Core curriculum movement, which aims to better prepare students for college and career. But the first new tests sent scores tumbling, and parents and unions alike saw red over the widespread failure. The political establishment saw which way the wind was blowing and joined the resistance.
Despite its shortcomings, the Common Core is a sincere effort to better prepare students for life after 12th grade. By definition, that goal assumes that not every student or teacher will meet the standards.
That proved to be the rub. Our culture craves success so much that it can’t tolerate failure — even when that failure is a diagnostic measurement, not a lifetime verdict. But, with the unions milking the discontent to try to keep even the worst teachers on the payroll, the defenders of standards are stampeding the exits.
There is one glorious exception: the best charter schools. They’re not asking to be exempt from the higher standards. Their students are meeting them because their teachers and parents understand the purpose and embrace the challenge.
The startling comparisons between charters and traditional public schools in places like Harlem explain why charters must be allowed to expand.
Their excellence serves as a reminder — an annoying one to the de Blasio-Fariña crowd — that America’s children can compete with anyone if we demand that they do and help them succeed.
Don’t let the charter light go out. If it does, darkness will prevail.
Preet makes a case of it
It is said the real scandal of politics is not what’s illegal, but what is legal. That lesson is lost on Manhattan prosecutor Preet Bharara.
The federal gangbuster has a sterling record when it comes to busting government crooks and Wall Street greed heads, but he’s lost the plot by hinting there is something shady about Gov. Cuomo’s pulling the plug on the Moreland Commission panel.
Its nine-month life, he argued in a radio interview, was “not the amount of time necessary for a public corruption prosecution to mature.”
There are two problems with his view. First, the Moreland Commission panel was not doing prosecutions, and Cuomo made it clear from the start he was willing to stop its fact-finding work if legislators passed a series of legal changes. They did, and he did.
Personally, I believe the governor made a mistake. The panel was digging into the capital’s seedy transactional culture, and taxpayers would have been better served if it had kept going. It had the potential to reveal how Albany is rigged, even if much of the rot is legal.
But the governor effectively offered lawmakers a plea bargain, and they took it. Bharara himself routinely makes plea deals with real criminals, so he knows discretion has a role.
Second, Bharara’s holier-than-thou attitude is striking in a man whose boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, has turned the Justice Department into a White House protection squad.
Holder’s refusal to cooperate with Congress on the Fast and Furious gun-running operation earned him a contempt finding, the first AG ever to suffer that dishonor. And he is slow-walking the probe of IRS efforts to penalize conservative groups, again showing he will put his thumb on the scales of justice to help his political patron.
Bharara, then, lives in a glass house and ought to think twice before throwing stones.
Missing: CNN’s news judgment
If searchers ever find that missing Malaysian jetliner, the grief will be enormous — at CNN. The nonstop coverage about non-developments has passed from bad journalism to farce. Is anybody really watching nothing happen day after day?
One last glitch for Sebelius
If you saw it, you had to wince. After enduring a public pounding for five years over ObamaCare, outgoing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (inset) couldn’t find the last page of her farewell speech. No doubt a computer glitch ate it.
Then again, she’s getting off easy. Sebelius never again has to listen to Barack Obama promise, “You can keep your doctor,” when she knows you can’t. And she’s now free to stop pretending the law is working as planned.
Then again, she better never get sick. A death panel knows her name.
Takes a licking
The “kissing congressman” refuses to quit. Louisiana Republican Vance McAllister, caught on tape kissing an aide, campaigned as a Christian family man but instead is “an example of why ordinary people are fed up with politics,” said the state’s GOP chairman.
Amen to that.