Cuomo and New York State Continue to Fail Minority Youth
Politicians whine. Politicians bluster. Politicians blame. New York State GovernorAndy Cuomo does it with the worst of them, especially when it comes to education. It is easy to blame teachers; but it is much harder to take responsibility for your own failures and the failure of state government to live up to its constitutional mandate to educate all children.
In his latest report, "The State of New York's Failing Schools," Cuomo placed most of the blame for educational failure on teachers and an inadequate and too lenient teacher rating system that he himself put in place. Failing schools were defined as schools repeatedly in the bottom 5% of combined student English and math scores on standardized tests or schools with a graduation rate below 60% for the past three years.
According to Governor Andy, "It is incongruous that 99% of teachers were rated effective, while only 35.8 percent of our students are proficient in math and 31.4 percent in English language arts." Andy rhetorically asked, "How can so many of our teachers be succeeding when so many of our students are struggling?"
But the answer is in the report. "Statewide, more than 9 out of 10 students in failing schools are minority or poor." It easy to blame teachers for poor school performance when the real problem in New York State is not education, but racism and poverty.
If you read the report carefully, New York State's urban minority schools in low-income communities uniformly perform poorly. Maybe the schools needed to do a better job teaching Governor Andy, who graduated from prestigious Archbishop Molloy High School, Fordham University and Albany Law School, how to do math and read better.
There are also numerous errors in the Cuomo school failure report and I suspect heads are going to roll. I compared % of Free and Reduced Price Lunch Students (FRPL) on the Cuomo report with % free lunch eligibility on the New York City Department of Education (DOE) School Quality Guide for 2013-2014. FRPL is a measure of students living in low-income families. Cuomo's report says that 9.1% of the students at John Adams High School in Queens County are eligible for free or reduced priced lunch. The NYC guide puts the number of students "Free Lunch Eligible" at Adams High School at 74%. The pattern of error continues at other Queens County high schools. According to the Cuomo report, 3.3% of the students atCuomo and New York State Continue to Fail Minority Youth | Alan Singer:
