Jarrett Stepman writes for the Daily Signal about bad news involving New York City’s public schools.
New York City, like so many other big, blue cities, serves as an excellent model for how spending overwhelming amounts of taxpayer money can get so much less than underwhelming results.
A recent report created a damning picture of New York City public schools as mass factories of educational failure.
New York Success Academy, a charter school network in New York, dug through public data to show “New Yorkers how deep this failure runs” and how long it has been running.
The results are both sad and infuriating.
The study found that 906 schools in the city, roughly half of the total number, “had fewer than half their students passing math, reading, or both on state exams last year.”
“Those 906 schools enroll 409,379 students: 43 percent of all NYC public school children. In 503 of those schools, the majority of students failed both math and reading,” the report noted.
It said the data came from “NYS Education Department school accountability records, NYC Department of Education school quality and expenditure data, federal school improvement designation databases, and standardized test results spanning more than a decade.”
Not only are the schools failing by national test metrics, but according to the report, many of the public schools have been trying to hide their bad report cards from the public with methods like grade inflation, lowering test cut scores so it appears more students are passing, and “a school survey designed to measure satisfaction rather than learning.”
Fox News reported on a New York Public Schools official’s response to the report. The official said that it is “riddled with misdirections, misinformation, and allegations not based in fact” and that they are “proud of the gains that have been made in reading and math across schools and demographics this past year.”
The public data, however, hardly looks like something the city should be proud of.
