State education bosses Merryl Tisch and David Steiner promised a jarring dose of truth-telling when they re leased this year’s student-assessment scores.
Yesterday, it seems, they delivered.
Thanks to a harder-to-fudge test and more realistic cutoff scores, the proportion of statewide third- through eighth-graders deemed proficient this year in English dropped to 53 percent — down from 77 percent in 2009.
Math proficiency plummeted about as much, to 61 percent from 86 percent.
These numbers represent a critical first step toward a credible classroom-performance-testing regime; without such benchmarks, no meaningful education reform is possible.
But they are only a first step, and it very much remains to be seen whether Tisch and Steiner have the ability — or the will — to bend New York’s education cartel to a legitimate reform agenda.
Indeed, we’ve have differences with Tisch in the past precisely because she has been too close to the teachers unions and their champion, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
Bogus scores, after all, are a godsend for adults looking to duck responsibility for student performance, or lack thereof — even as lying to kids about their progress does them no favors.
But, again, yesterday’s report is a promising sign. Tisch and Steiner seem to be embarked on a sincere and well-thought-through effort to ensure that test scores actually mean something again.
They’re pegging the formerly arbitrary “proficiency” cut score to students’ future chances of hacking it in non-remedial college classes.
And the report seems honestly to address New York’s racial achievement gap, whose supposedly dramatic decline in recent years was the cause of much establishment self-congratulation.
Turns out, it’s easy to narrow a gap when everyone’s converging at 100 percent proficient. In reality, white students still lead black students by 30 points in proficiency in both math and reading — exactly what the gap was four years ago.
Then again, political pressure to “close” that gap is one of the forces that certainly will conspire to re-inflate scores.
And New York City teachers will be pushing hard to pump up the numbers irrespective of actual performance, because they qualify for bonuses if their schools make enough “progress” on state tests.
Tisch and Steiner, in other words, will need real courage to maintain and improve the integrity of student assessments in coming years.
They’ve made a good start; it’s vital that they stick with it.