On Wednesday, a fresh round of state exam results — from the new, far tougher math and English tests kids took last spring — will make it look, to the untrained eye or politically expedient critic, like city students are suddenly learning far less.
Wrong. The precipitous drop will simply be a sign that the nation’s largest public school system is making an overdue and necessary shift to the far more challenging Common Core standards.
Standards that are higher in math and English, and consistent across most American states.
Standards that demand deeper understanding and critical thinking skills, not shallow learning.
Standards that, if met, will finally begin to equip the five boroughs’ 1.1 million public school kids to compete in the global economy, in which they’re now barely treading water.
Preferring difficult truths over delusional fiction, New York , under state Education Commissioner John King, has taken the bold step of raising the bar for its students now.
Which is far better than waiting until boys and girls become young men and women, hit college and realize, as nearly four-fifths of incoming CUNY students do, that they’re not ready for higher education. Or until they enter the workforce and discover the skills they thought they had are in fact wholly inadequate for 21st century employers.
This is not some abstract complaint; it is an economic imperative. In Singapore, 63% of students rate as proficient in math on one international test. In Korea, 58%. In the United States, that figure is just 32%.
On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about a third of New York State’s students in fourth and eighth grades hit proficiency benchmarks in reading and math. For the city, the numbers are lower still .
We either close our eyes to this reality, or we wrestle with it. Which is why the reaction to the new raft of exam results will itself be a pass-fail test for those who aspire to be mayor.
The right answer is to welcome the reality check — and say students can, must and will do better with the help of teachers who are prepared to teach a challenging new curriculum and are held, like pupils, to proper standards.
The wrong answer is to beat a retreat, blame tests and opportunistically attack King and Mayor Bloomberg — who, here, are courageous messengers of troubling but necessary news.
Kids can and will excel, if only the rest of us have the fortitude to set them up for success.
