Unlearning the Factory Mindset: How Education Must Evolve for the AI Era
Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times 8/12/2025 | Updated: 8/12/2025
We are at the start of a new industrial revolution, yet we still think with factory minds forged in the last revolution. Kay Rubacek is an award-winning filmmaker, author, speaker, and former host of NTD's 'Life & Times.' After being detained in a Chinese prison for advocating for human rights, she has dedicated her work to facing communist and socialist regimes in their modern, global forms. She has also contributed to The Epoch Times since 2010. Author's Selected Articles
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Trump reveals Xi told him China will not invade Taiwan while he's US president
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New York Post
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Test-tinkering: New York State lowered the bar for some students to pass 2025 reading, math exams
City officials are crowing over gains on the 2025 reading and math exams, but the state lowered the passing benchmarks for some students — raising questions about boasts of substantial academic progress, experts told The Post. The tests, given statewide to NYC public school kids in grades 3 through 8, required third graders to get just 57% of questions correct on the English Language Arts exam to pass, down from 60% last year. Fourth graders had to get 56% right, down from 65%, and 6th graders had to answer 57% correctly, down from 63%, according to a stunning analysis by the Times-Union. 4 State education commissioner Betty A. Rosa oversees the administration and scoring of annual state reading and math exams. AP The test-tinkering resulted in big improvements in NYC. Third-graders showed an 8.4 point increase in reading, with a whopping 63.6 % of students showing proficiency on the exam compared to 52.5% last year. 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In math, 56.9% of NYC students passed the math exam, up 3.5 percentage points from 53.4% in 2024, according to released data. Officials did not disclose any changes in the scoring. The state uses 'a really complicated statistical model' to determine whether some test questions are harder or easier for students than questions given the year before, said Aaron Pallas, a professor of education and sociology at Columbia University's Teachers College. 4 In NYC, about 58 percent of 3rd-graders showed reading proficiency, a nearly 13-point gain, but the state lowering the benchmark for passing, claiming the test was more difficult than last year. insta_photos – 'What the state is saying happened is that this year's test turned out to be slightly more difficult than expected, and that means that students didn't have to score as highly,' Pallas told The Post. Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos credited the city's 2024 overhaul of literacy and math curriculums for the test-score increases. 'The gains we're seeing are proof that initiatives like NYC Reads and NYC Solves are delivering for our children,' she said. Pallas isn't sold. 'I understand that you've got a mayor who's up for re-election and a chancellor who is tethered to him, so of course they want to claim that it's stuff that they did that is largely responsible. But I think it's a little too early to tell. I want to see next year's data before claiming victory for the curriculum.' 4 This chart shows proficiency on this year's reading and math exams. Tam Nguyen / NYPost Design David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor, agreed. 'While there's good news here, the city's celebrations should be more muted,' he said. 'Revelations that the state decreased some scores needed to show proficiency blurs the picture — especially for third and fourth graders who saw some of the greatest increases.' The state did not change the passing levels in ELA for fifth, seventh and eighth graders, the Times-Union analysis found. But in math, reaching proficiency was harder. Fifth-graders had to correctly answer 51% of the items, up from 48% in 2024. Seventh and 8th graders had to get 53% of the points, up from 50% and 49% respectively last year. Because the state revamped the standardized tests in 2023 due to new learning standards, it's impossible to gauge progress over prior years. Connors refused The Post's request for the 2025 cut scores, saying they will be released in a 'technical report' several months from now. 'We need the raw scores,' said Danyela Souza Egorov, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where she co-authored a recent report showing that NYC's 4th and 8th graders have for years performed below the state in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), considered the 'gold standard' and most reliable of standardized tests. It's unclear whether the scoring changes are the result of 'poor test writing or intentional number fudging,' she said. 'We just need more transparency so we can make sure that the public can trust the results being published.'
