I guess this is one way to deal with public schools utterly failing to educate: just lower the standards for what counts as proficient.

New York state has decided to permanently lower the math and reading proficiency standards due to the dramatic fall in test scores since the COVID lockdowns destroyed children’s educations. A committee has reported that student performance has been permanently damaged and that lower competence has become “the new normal.”

New York will make it easier for students to reach “proficiency” on state math and English language arts tests, calling last year’s lower scores the “new normal.”

A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight. Some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The committee handles all scoring, not just this year’s changes.

I remember the halcyon days when everybody was convinced that kicking kids out of school to protect students from a nonexistent threat would harm nobody. “Kids are resilient,” we were told. Parents who wanted their kids back in school were heartless grandma killers. Any fears about learning loss were right-wing conspiracy theories.

Apparently not. I am shocked.

Lowering the standards is yet another in a long line of betrayals for students. We don’t have public schools as a luxury: getting an education is vital for the lifelong success of the kids we send to the schools.

Public educators betrayed students by abandoning them during the pandemic, and they are betraying them again by refusing to help kids regain the education they have lost. This lowering of the standards isn’t to benefit the students, but to make life easier for the very people who betrayed the kids in the first place.

Public schools aren’t run for the benefit of children. If they were they would do a much better job of educating kids. The educational standards are far too low already, and lowering them is just one more concession to the adults who make a living off the system.

Teaching hard? Well, I guess we will make it easier for you by not requiring you to teach. And what about the good teachers who really are in it for the kids’ benefit? Their jobs have been made yet more difficult. The only people benefiting are the ones who want to show that they are succeeding.

Tests show the schools are failing? Change the test so the schools look better.

Honestly, given public schools’ real mission–the creation of a cohort of cultural Marxists–I don’t understand why they bother with reading and math anymore. Why test at all, if they don’t care about whether students are learning.

Change everything to drag studies, climate activism, and gender transition and be done with it. Maybe riot studies too, since rioting is now a public health imperative.