Producing an Idiotocracy

As we reported here, it’s been going on for decades in serious colleges and universities. Affirmative action admissions, coupled with grade inflation, have produced large numbers of credentialed college graduates who are incompetent and incapable. Unfortunately, if you say so, you are denounced as a bigot.

Now, the same principles are being applied in New York City public schools. Teachers who cannot or will not teach hand out good grades to their pupils. As Wei Wah Chin remarks in a New York Post op ed (via Maggie’s Farm) the graduates of these schools end up knowing nothing. How does anyone believe that they will be able to participate in the economy?

The impetus is coming from the top:

Recently, teachers at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens complained that administrators forced them to pass failing students. Last year, a long-stalled investigation revealed that Maspeth High School in Queens repeatedly faked passing grades. In 2020, at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill High School where more than 70% of the students were failing, the principal was secretly recorded instructing teachers to just pass kids. This happens not just at isolated failing schools; data on middle schools show widespread grade fraud in New York City public schools, and the worst often occur in predominantly black communities.

And here is the best story:

One such school is the Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem, where in 8th grade, 95% of students failed Math proficiency according to New York State standardized testing, but the school passed 93.9% of them in that subject. The founder and former head of the Eagle Academy network, David Banks, is now Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. He quickly banished standardized tests from large swathes of NYC’s education landscape.

Yes, indeed, the head of the Eagle Academy is not the Chancellor of the City Department of Education. His first gesture-- abolish standardized testing and dumb down the best city schools. If you were wondering why there has been an exodus from city public schools, David Banks and his boss Eric Adams are a good place to start:

Acclaimed middle and high schools that offered rigorous academics to carefully matched students — selected in part by standardized testing — must dumb down because they now admit by lottery. And families who drew poorly in the admissions lottery are in tears as their children are assigned schools they’ve never heard of before, hours away from home. But educrats erect fancy facades in front of these train wrecks, calling them something they aren’t, trying to fool us.

The author concludes, somewhat wistfully. And yet, he merely wants to break the teachers’ unions and return to something like the past methods. One suspects that he is whistling past they graveyard. Such actions would require the parents of minority children to rise up against Democratic politicians and teachers unions. Don’t hold your breath:

We need standardized testing, attacked by Potemkin school defenders, because it so indisputably exposes their academic dumbing-down. We need school choice, so families can vote with their feet as educrats continue to lie while robbing their children of an education.

But the status quo of Potemkin schools is protected by teachers’ unions, which don’t give one whit that a transcript full of A’s is a lie.