Sol Stern's Testing Mess story in the new Gadfly is not to be missed, as Stern documents the incompetence and cynicism of New York state's former education leaders, who shamelessly dumbed down the standards to satisfy narrow and short-term political gain.
An interesting sidebar to the story comes from Buffalo News columnist Rod Watson, who notes, ?If the idea of naming schools after community or national leaders was to inspire, the brainstorm has failed about as miserably as the schools themselves?.
Scan the list of schools behaving badly in teaching third-through eighth-graders. The names read like a who's who of luminaries who never would have achieved their success if they had performed like some of these kids.
At Harriet Ross Tubman Academy, only 2.3 percent of fourth-graders and 5.4 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in English. Only 5.9 percent of third-graders make the grade in math.
That gun Tubman carried when leading blacks to freedom? If she'd known this is where we'd be 150 years later, she might have turned it on herself.
It doesn't take much to make the point, as Watson goes through a depressingly long list of schools, including the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Multicultural Institute, the Dr. Charles Drew Science Magnet, and the Dr. Antonia Pantoja Community School of Academic Excellence, all of which had scores similar to that of the Harriet Tubman Academy.
Concludes Watson, ?[I]f King had known he would be `honored' like this, he'd have said, `I Have a Nightmare.'?
?Peter Meyer
