Don't stall education reforms

The math and reading scores of fourth- and eighth-graders reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress this week brought mixed news for the nation, and sad results for New York State.

Nationally, test scores rose one point in fourth- and eighth-grade math and also in eighth-grade reading since 2009. In fourth-grade reading, the average fell one point. Progress in improving the scores, steady until 2003, has now slowed to a standstill nationally.

And New York has actually lost ground of late, the only state in the nation where fourth-grade math scores fell. The chairman of NAEP's governing board pointed to New York as one of three states where progress has been particularly lacking over the last eight years.

There are reasons for this, but no excuses.

Enormous achievement gaps persist for minority students, and that population in the state has gone from 25 percent to 46 percent of enrollment in the past 20 years. Narrowing those gaps, in particular for Hispanic and black students, is a challenge educators here, and nationwide, have trouble overcoming.

A bigger problem, though, is that we don't take education as seriously as the nations bent on surpassing us.

In our homes and communities, the message has to be unswerving: Education is the top priority; nothing comes before it, or close to it. But that emphasis won't work for kids left without the tools. So we have to ensure every child has the opportunities necessary for success.

New York can get better by adopting the practices of a state like Massachusetts, which enjoys success via high standards and ambitious curricula. Here standards are so low that many of our students pass the state metrics while failing the federal ones.

New York adopted national Common Core standards last January, and they are being tested in a few places this year. The process, though, threatens to stretch out forever, and tests to help ensure standards are implemented won't even begin until 2014.

Also moving slowly in New York is an educational bureaucracy stalling efforts to evaluate the performance of teachers. Evaluations would allow them to be rewarded, retrained or eliminated based on that performance. One day after the state's abysmal test scores were announced, a letter from 368 school principals asked that implementation of a plan to start assessing teachers be slowed to a crawl. That can't be allowed to happen. Assessments need to be fair and workable, but they also need to swing into effect quickly to be part of the state's education solution.

Nationally, and in New York, improving our educational system is possible. Long a nation of immigrants and diversity, we can't use new populations as an excuse to fail. If we make education our highest priority, we'll succeed in fixing it. If we don't, our children and grandchildren, our nation even, won't succeed at much of anything. hN