They held a press conference in Albany this week to announce that New York’s statewide high-school graduation rate in 2013 had inched up by nine-tenths of a percentage point from the year before, to 74.9 percent. Yay.
Oh, and by the way, it also was revealed that the state’s ability-to-function-in-a-modern-economy rate among graduates hovers at a dismal 37 percent.
That is, according to the state Department of Education, only 37 of every 100 students who entered high school in 2009, and stayed long enough to graduate, learned enough by last June to do college-level academic work — or to enter the workforce in any meaningful way.
And in New York City, the ratio was one in four.
So let’s cut to the chase: If 75 percent of New York high-school seniors get diplomas, but only 37 percent are academically or economically functional, just what’s required to earn that diploma in the first place?
Bipedalism and a pulse, it would appear. But where’s the outrage?
There is none. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the self-appointed chief lobbyist for public education in New York, took a dive on stringent teacher accountability standards this election year.
He decided to get tough on heroin instead, and has been hopscotching the state all week signing the same anti-drug bills for local TV cameras.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, snugly in the teachers union’s pocket, has nothing to say at all — though his de jure schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, offered this thought Monday: “We have a lot of work to do to ensure that all our students are graduating.”
Ya think?
“Today’s numbers reinforce the urgency of implementation of [tougher] standards,” offered state Education Commissioner John King — true enough, but pointless boilerplate.
And then there was Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents — and, as such, the most powerful person in formal education in the Empire State.
Titularly, anyway.
A year ago, Tisch characterized similar workforce-readiness numbers as tragic, and she was correct. Monday, she didn’t have even that much to say — except to imply that minority-student performance, abysmal even by the larger sad standards, was driven by a lack of “equity.”
Well, if that’s the case, who’s more to blame than Tisch herself? And if she’s not to be held accountable, who is?
New York spent $54.2 billion on primary and secondary education during the 2011-12 fiscal year — the last for which full figures are available.
One would think that a dedicated prospector would be able to scratch sufficient equity from such a treasure trove to satisfy the needs of all concerned.
One would be wrong.
Per-student spending — just shy of $20,000 — was far and away the highest in the nation, and almost double the national average, according to the US Census Bureau.
But $13,600 of that went to support teacher and administrator salary and benefits — leaving not a lot for equity enhancement, or for anything else that might actually boost classroom performance.
Which is just the way the teachers unions want it — and, by extension, the way New York’s education establishment delivers it.
Take Tisch, for example.
She got her job by virtue of appointment by the state Legislature sitting “as a committee of the whole” — that is, with the Assembly and Senate voting together.
And because Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver controls an absolute majority of the votes in such a circumstance, he got to appoint Tisch without interference from the state Senate — or, for that matter, from Andrew Cuomo himself.
Silver, notoriously, is a teachers union cat’s-paw. So it’s no surprise that Tisch — coincidentally an old friend from the Lower East Side — is inclined that way, too.
Indeed, so much so that last year she co-chaired the campaign of the United Federation of Teachers’ first mayoral candidate, William Thompson — openly raising money for Thompson arm-in-arm with former UFT president Randi Weingarten.
If that’s not compromised, what is?
To be clear, New York’s public-education problems are complex and deep-seated.
The fact is that an education can’t be performed on an unwilling child — nor are the children of disconnected parents generally going to prosper in school. And New York has far more than its share of reluctant pupils and parents.
But it remains that there is no more reactionary a force in public education than the unions — and nowhere are the unions more deeply entrenched than in New York.
Irrefutable evidence of that is the ambivalence with which official New York greets news like Monday’s “graduation” figures.
They’re a bloody scandal, but who the hell cares?