One reason for that is New York’s public school systems’ insistence, prompted by militant teachers unions, on closing schools more or less continuously from March 2020 to September 2022 during prime COVID-19 hysteria. The students were supposed to be on remote learning, but it turned out that children, especially very young children, didn’t have the concentration to focus on screens for long periods of time—that is, when they or their parents even bothered to get screens in front of them. Closed schools during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a nationwide decline in standardized-test scores.
The reaction of the scoring committee to this catastrophe was to dub the dramatically lower 2022 scores as a “new normal” and then use them for setting a substantially altered baseline for “proficiency.” New York’s education bureaucrats prefer to use the word “change” rather than “lower” when it comes to setting that baseline, but it’s clear that the standards that were operative in 2019 will be nowhere near that level in 2023. And “proficiency” isn’t a particularly demanding standard. It simply means that a student is performing at grade level, getting B’s and C’s, not necessarily A’s. But now “grade level” will mean something entirely different in New York.
All of this—whether it’s making social promotion the new norm or simply redefining what counts as “proficiency”—is part of a current trend of dealing with the fact that some students can’t meet educational standards by eliminating the standards themselves.
This massive collapse of educational standards has been in the name of sparing young people the stigma of being labeled as failures.
Or in the name of racial “equity,” the insistence on equal outcomes for everyone regardless of ability or achievement. Anything else—honors classes, letter grades, requiring students to reach a certain level of subject-matter mastery before they can move on—smacks of “tracking,” now a dirty word in education circles.
For nearly a century, separating students into ability groups—average, above-average, and below-average—was the norm in U.S. education. Starting in the 1960s, it began to be abolished as racially discriminatory: too many minority and low-income children on the bottom tracks. More recently, school districts have jettisoned gifted and talented programs and sought to get rid of merit-based admissions to academically prestigious high schools such as San Francisco’s Lowell and New York’s Stuyvesant high schools. The operating principle: If you can’t raise everyone to the top, you can push everyone to the bottom, with dumbed-down classes for all.
This hurts everyone and not least the students of less-than-stellar academic talent. Students seem to learn best in classes targeted to their actual level of ability, where they can take pride in mastering what they’re capable of mastering. Not every student is a math whiz who can climb the rungs to pre-calculus, but large numbers of students can learn some basic algebra taught at the right pace and where they won’t feel like failures in a roomful of high achievers. In turn, the high achievers won’t waste their time in slow-paced classrooms. If the goal of public education is, as its defenders assert, to help all students reach their potential, ability grouping targeted to individual students’ strengths and weaknesses can accomplish exactly that.
Right now, however, we seem sadly headed in the opposite direction. Prompted by the COVID-19 panic-generated school closings that led to massive declines in student achievement, we seem determined to push those achievement levels even lower, if not dissolve them altogether via a wholesale abandonment of academic standards. Inevitably, the taxpayers who fund the expensive U.S. public education system are going to wonder why they’re paying for their children to learn so little. And who could blame them?
