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Aside from a few sentences, education has played virtually no role in either the primary or the current mayoral campaigns. Cuomo yes and Mamdani no on charter schools, Cuomo yes, Mamdani no on mayor control, no policy papers (aside from Cuomo’s 25 Point Education Plan released in May) and Mamdani’s recent announcement to end Gifted Kindergarten classes,
The apparent winner, Mamdani has a substantial lead in the polls, and mayoral control sunsets at the end of June: either revert to the pre- mayoral control system, extend, amend or reconstruct.
Across the nation educational writers, researchers, and think tanks have been bemoaning the outcomes on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard of assessment metrics.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed widespread declines in reading, math, and science scores across the country, with students in all grades scoring below pre-pandemic levels in most areas.
Should we blame the pandemic, phones, Artificial Intelligence, our cultural icons, the devaluing of knowledge?
ESEA requires standardized testing in grades 3-8 and a test in English and Math once in high school. Most states use the SAT or the ACT, there is no passing score, no exit exam. NYS has used the Regents Examinations and a number of alternative assessments, see here.
The NYS Board of Regents is planning to replace Regents Examinations with “Portrait of a Graduate” skills.
The NYS Education Department proclaims,
The collective goal is to ensure every student graduates, not only academically prepared, but equipped with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to thrive in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. A New York State high school graduate will be:
- Academically Prepared:
- A Creative Innovator:
- A Critical Thinker:
- An Effective Communicator:
- A Global Citizen:
- Reflective and Future Focused: .
New York State is phasing out Regents exams as a requirement for high school graduation, with the change set to go into effect for students entering ninth grade in the fall of 2027. Students will still take the exams, but passing them will not be necessary to receive a diploma. Instead, students will have new pathways to demonstrate their learning, aligning with the state’s “Portrait of a Graduate” initiative, which emphasizes skills like critical thinking and problem-solving through options like projects or presentations.
Key details of the phase-out:
- Timeline: The changes will begin for students who start ninth grade in the 2027-28 school year.
- New Graduation Pathway: Instead of passing Regents exams, students will demonstrate proficiency through alternative methods such as capstone projects, community service, or work-based learning experiences.
- Purpose: The goal is to provide more equitable and flexible ways for students to show what they know and to allow them to earn endorsements on their diplomas for various skills.
- Federal Requirement: Students will continue to take certain state assessments required by federal law, but they will not need a passing score to graduate.
- Continued Use of Exams: Regents exams will still be offered as a way for students to demonstrate their knowledge and potentially earn advanced certificates or seals of endorsement on their diplomas.
David Steiner, currently Executive Director of the John Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, formerly the NYS Commissioner of Education has grave doubts,
Have you read that K-12 education must focus on “critical thinking,” “positive mindset” and “metacognitive skills“? If you have heard these assertions once, you have heard them a hundred times. But repetition doesn’t make these admonitions more plausible. A moment’s reflection will reveal, for example, that you can’t think critically about nothing in particular, that having a positive mindset bears a remarkable resemblance to staying upbeat in the face of setbacks and that metacognitive skills such as “retrieval practice” were once known as learning the material for a test. The productive transfer of skills from one domain of human activity to another, which underlines the call for the nurturing of many of these capacities, is exceptionally rare.
Meanwhile, it is ever more common for school districts and states to publish “portrait of the graduate” — a vision of the well-educated student. As a review of this collection of portraits reveals, there is little emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge. One study that scanned a large number of such portraits produced this condensed list: “Analyze to understand, care for and contribute to society, collaborate across difference, communicate in all media and modalities, create to solve and share, and practice self-awareness and regulation.” Such a hodgepodge of metacognitive, behavioral and ethical goals is often confused, wrongheaded or underthought from the start. To analyze something, you need to know what it’s about; communication in the absence of learning might well be mindless or destructive. In public (and private) schools that are increasingly segregated by income and race, what “differences” are we talking about?
But the drumbeat continues — often found in the admonition to “teach 21st century skills,” with the ethical implication that an education that doesn’t provide them is cruelly undermining children’s very well-being. A careful review of these “new” skills reveals a lengthy laundry list, multiple elements of which lack sharp definition or repackage long-held, if perennially vacuous, pedagogical aims To cite some examples, I have my doubts that our century alone values “managing time and resources effectively to complete tasks and achieve outcomes,” or that “forming well-reasoned arguments” would strike us (or even the ancient Greeks) as anything but obvious as an educational goal.
Even elements that seem both contemporary and sane, such as teaching digital literacy and the thoughtful use of artificial intelligence, leave us pressing for meaning. What standards should teachers and students use to evaluate social media if they know little to nothing about the topic?
What has been devalued in these exhortations to impart “skills” is the teaching of knowledge about the world, including geography, history, high-level science and math, foreign languages and the human condition through literature and the arts. Why do we devalue and neglect real knowledge? One key reason is that knowing is equated with “memorization” — a term that has apparently become a pejorative label for an antiquated model of learning. This is astonishing. We expect experts to know vast amounts of information by heart, regardless of whether they are surgeons or concert pianists. We know that without storage of information in long-term memory, learning would become next to impossible — indeed, survival itself would be at risk.
I believe the Portrait of a Graduate model is a mistake, and Steiner’s criticism has merit, and while the Regents work towards the implementation: with most high school teachers teaching five periods a day with maybe 25 students in a class, how is it possible to monitor the construction of 125 portfolios, projects or demonstrations? Just asking.
In New York City we are at a moment in history, a new mayor who sees value in parents and teachers playing a role in reconstructing our educational system
In my view Mamdani with a substantial polling lead, will become the next mayor and aside from free buses, government run grocery stores and freezes on rent stabilized apartments he can choose to reconstruct our educational system, a system that has been meandering for a dozen years, edicts from the eeries of power boasting of success while the folks in the trenches, the educators are treated as assembly line workers tightening bolts, not engaging with an incredibly diverse student body with a diverse array of needs. We are not assembly line workers, we are writers, actors, producers, directors and critics of a performance with a run of one day.
Newly elected mayors traditionally select transition teams to coordinate the handoff of one administration to the successor administration. The mayor appoints about 300 commissioners, deputy commissioners, etc. Education is different, de Blasio interviewed chancellor candidates in secret in the back room of a restaurant and selected a friend who rolled back the system, hired her friends and began basically the abandonment of the school system.
I would urge the new mayor to gather the “best and the brightest” educational minds to recommend a new educational system, I have ideas, and I plan to recommend who I consider joining the team. Tempus fugit, the legislature convenes in January and Mamdani needs a legislative agenda.
Stay tuned
Ed in the Apple: Blogging on the Intersection of Education and Politics Title 