#New York’s education bureaucrats put the kids’ interests last

The blows keeping coming for New York City school kids — with some of them specifically meant to hide just how disastrous this school year has become.

The latest? The State Education Department last week canceled Regents exams for January.

“We determined the January Regents exams could not be safely, equitably and fairly administered across the state, given where the pandemic currently stands,” muttered Interim New York State Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa. How convenient.

This comes on the heels of news of the city’s new grading system for this year: Everyone passes. Elementary-school students will receive grades of an “N” (needs improvement) and middle- and high-school kids an “NX” (course in progress) in place of failing grades.

Which means no one — not school staff, teachers or kids — has much reason to put in much effort.

Think about it: How hard will kids work if they know they can’t fail? Why would teachers spend much time trying to get a child up to speed if they can slap an “N” or “NX” on their report card and make it someone else’s problem?

All this fits a trend: Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has long wanted to cancel state tests. In August, he openly hoped a Joe Biden administration would let him do just that.

Why end testing? Because doing away with tests and failing grades means no one can tell just how horrifically the schools are doing.

City and state educrats would love that to be the permanent state of affairs, but at least for now, they can use COVID as an excuse to push exams off. And that’s particularly fortunate for them, because the quality of education during this pandemic has plummeted so far, folks might take to the streets with pitchforks if they knew just how little their kids were learning.

Carranza and Mayor de Blasio are also looking to use the virus to make another long sought-after shift: eliminating the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is used to determine who gets into the city’s top high schools. The most recent SHSAT test was just canceled, with no new date. Who knows if there’ll ever be one, and if not, how kids will be selected for these top schools. “We’re working that out,” fudged the mayor.

New Yorkers mustn’t let them slide. There’s got to be some kind of accountability. With no grades, no tests and limited parental interaction with teachers because of remote learning, we’ll have little idea of how big an impact the pandemic has had on our children’s education.

Other schools around the country don’t have this problem, particularly in the suburbs. Those schools are open. They’re functioning like it’s any other school year, except for the masks.

And the inequities are sometimes hard to miss: A child living in, say, Rockaway, Queens, might go to school twice a week under the city’s ridiculous “blended” model, while a child two miles away in Nassau County will go full-time. For people who pretend to be so concerned with “equity,” there sure seems little concern about the gulf between those two.

How can a city that prides itself on its excellence OK this? There’s a reason they say, “If you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere”: Making it in New York is hard. It means being the best, and that takes work. To get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice. To be a top New York doctor, lawyer or CEO, you better give it your all.

No, we can’t afford to let New York kids or school officials take shortcuts and hand them participation trophies. We can’t cover up failure with an “N” or “NX.”

Yet that’s the message we’re sending kids: Not only is school unimportant; working hard is for suckers.

For all the talk of New York bouncing back, it begins and ends with our schools. If our schools remain closed indefinitely, the city won’t ever recover, and we’ll raise a generation of kids who won’t be able to compete.

During this COVID crisis, we need more metrics, more transparency in our schools, not less. We can’t let bureaucrats hide their failures. Let’s make them provide evidence of their accomplishments and hold them accountable. It’s the least we can do for our kids.