New York’s testing farce proceeds apace.
On Thursday, the State Education Department patted itself on the back for its “early” release of “instructional reports” for English and math tests administered last spring. Truth is, the full scores won’t be ready for another couple of weeks.
And that’s unforgivable.
Schools need these results to find out exactly how their students are doing and where they might need to make fixes. Same for moms and dads.
If your son or daughter were struggling in a subject, wouldn’t you have wanted to know at the beginning of summer — so your could have used the schol break to help get your child up to speed, or maybe considered sending him or her to another school?
The whole point of tests is that their main value is diagnostic. In fact, this year the tests were moved up to April — before the school year was complete — for the express purpose of getting the results earlier.
Yet these results won’t reach parents and schools until the week before the new school year starts, too late for either to do anything about them.
Back in June, the city Department of Education, which had been given the raw data by the state, released information about those in the bottom 10 percent citywide. So the numbers can be crunched earlier.
The state will say it needs the extra time to analyze the numbers so it can set proficiency levels. But the kids, their parents and their schools need these results more.
If they don’t get test results in time to use it to help kids do better, what good is testing?