New York Hits a New Pandemic Low on Student Testing
New York faced some eye-popping state test scores last year. Less than half of New York students in grades 3 through 8 scored at or above grade level in math and English. Worse yet, no eighth grader in Schenectady passed the math test. These abysmal scores demonstrate that schools and districts across the country still face the daunting task of pandemic academic recovery. Students’ substantial pandemic losses are proving durable, and the road back to pre-pandemic achievement will be hard won, if it can be won at all. Exacerbating schools’ challenges is that promising solutions are difficult to enact properly. Tutoring is a promising tack, but very few students actually use it. Extending learning time is also promising, but rare. Modest voluntary pushes to extend time have met stiff resistance, and just one state — New Mexico —has done so at scale. The road to real pandemic recovery contains few shortcuts. Unfortunately, New York state is trying to find one anyway — announcing last month they will lower the proficiency thresholds on most end-of-year assessments.
A committee reporting to the state’s Board of Regents recommended cutting the baseline scores for proficiency in both English and math after last year’s subpar results. Additionally, the state plans to lower the threshold for the U.S. History Regents exam, a high school graduation requirement.
In simple terms, that means the state will move their own goal posts on student tests to secure the appearance of progress. Why? The Board of Regents’s Marianna Perie made the logic plain, saying, “We’re at this new normal. So for New York we are saying the new baseline is 2022.”
This logic doesn’t match the world New York students will live in. It’s not like employers will lower their expectations because of the pandemic. Neither will colleges need less prepared candidates. If the world won’t lower expectations, neither should New York schools. Yet the Board of Regents is clearly signaling their acceptance of lost academic progress, rather than yearning to fix it.
Understanding the damage that shifting these benchmarks creates requires a refresher on why we have state proficiency levels in the first place. Beginning in 2002, Congress required states to annually test their students in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school, re-upping this requirement in 2015. Congress left the design of the tests and the thresholds for proficiency up to states to balance the states’ control over education with the need for consistent assessments of all students’ progress. And it works, if imperfectly, so long as states don’t monkey with the thresholds. Once they do, comparing progress from one year to another, such as before and after a pandemic, will be impossible.
New York’s meddling undermines the design of state assessments, which will obscure the extent and duration of pandemic learning loss for schools and students. That first order consequence is hardly the only one.
For students, the main drawback is that lowering the bar for proficiency will decrease expectations, and, inevitably, lower their actual performance. New York isn’t lowering the proficiency threshold because students shouldn’t or historically haven’t been able to pass the tests, but because fewer will after the pandemic. This “soft bigotry of post-pandemic expectations” is turning pandemic losses into permanent policy.
For schools’ recovery efforts, these shift can make addressing the very real lost learning more difficult. Schools that want to use tutoring or extra instructional time to boost students’ math and reading skills, especially for those who are most behind, will soon run into the “reality” that proficiency rates are increasing. Lowered proficiency standards will identify fewer struggling students, and as a result, many won’t be targeted, or believe they need the extra efforts to recover lost progress.
For schools’ public relations, there are only upsides. Annual reported test results reflect school performance, and lowering proficiency thresholds makes schools look better. Lowering the proficiency thresholds make schools look like they are making progress on academic recovery when in fact their scores are simply increasing from a new, low baseline. We would not condone schools cooking their books to look better-performing than they actually are. In fact, Congress established assessment requirements to ensure schools could not. Should we condone it when the books are rigged by the state of New York?
To be sure, the state is not lying to the public. After all, they are publicly announcing these upcoming changes. They are, however, deceiving the public when they obscure a clear view of students’ progress so that schools will look good as their students languish. Post-pandemic, the question remains: “Who will stand for rigor in students’ instruction and progress?” New York state officials are answering, “not us.”
Nat Malkus is a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in empirical research on K–12 schooling.
