The State Education Department HATES letting the public learn from test results
Most of the 'stakeholders' in New York public education would rather avoid any accountability by keeping everyone in the dark.
The law requires the State Education Department to do the testing and make the results public — but SED's political masters on the state Board of Regents actually hate standardized testing, and so constantly undermine the entire project.
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Thus, SED for the second year in a row has delayed until August on going public with results from testing done in the spring — though the actual scoring can't possibly take more than a few weeks, and past results came out at the start of the summer.
The assessments could, for example, empower parents to realize that their child this fall will move to a school with horrible results for most kids.
But seeing the info so late means it's likely too late to do anything about it.
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Another SED trick: Even as it released data for the regular public schools, it held back public reporting on charter schools.
At least, SED tried to: An error at the city Department of Education actually led to posting of city charters' data, and the info spread beyond control before the DOE could pull it offline.
That was a happy mistake: Last year, SED kept key charter info secret until December.
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SED has plenty of lame explanations for all its delays in sharing information, just as it does for periodically fiddling with the tests so that it's impossible to make meaningful comparisons of data across more than two or three years.
But the real cause is state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa, chosen by the regents precisely because she's an ally of the teachers unions and an opponent of charters: The unions hate transparency because it could lead to accountability; charters love it because they're all about accountability.
Charters — publicly funded but privately run — are the only New York City public schools that routinely deliver high-quality learning to kids from lower-income black and Hispanic families.
That, above all else, is what Rosa and the regents want to keep parents and the public in the dark about.
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