As New York’s Public School Spending Surges, Accountability Gets Short Shrift

The New York State education budget is ballooning, while the Board of Regents is systematically dismantling the tools that empower the public to hold our schools accountable. In 2024, Governor Hochul allocated an unprecedented $34.5 billion in school aid — an increase of $1.3 billion from the previous year. At the same time, the Board of Regents has been enacting policies that undermine accountability in our public education system. First, the Board of Regents has altered proficiency standards on state tests, effectively masking the reality of our children’s learning outcomes. In 2023, they argued that the post-pandemic learning loss represented “the new normal,” which justified adjusting state tests accordingly. This message conveys to New York families that they should not expect their children to perform at pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, this change conveniently prevents researchers from accurately assessing learning loss in 2024, unlike what is being done in other states. Second, the Board has abolished the Regents exam as a high school graduation requirement. This exam, in place for 159 years, is critical for gauging student proficiency in fundamental subjects such as math, English Language Arts, and science. Without it, New Yorkers will have no reliable way to assess whether state high school graduates met basic educational standards.Finally, the situation is about to worsen, as New Yorkers will soon lack any means to know whether students are regularly attending the most expensive public schools in the nation. Despite a damning report from the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, showing that 1 in 3 students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, the Department of Education has eliminated chronic absenteeism as a measure of school quality for federal grants under the Every Student Succeeds Act. This approach is in stark contrast to other states: Rhode Island makes absenteeism rates readily available online, and Connecticut provides monthly data. Yet, we’re left with outdated data from two years ago in New York. The bottom line is that New York has the most expensive public schools in the country, but we are left in the dark about our students’ academic performance, their learning progress upon graduating, and their regular school attendance. It is imperative that we reverse this trend of dismantling educational accountability systems and demand more timely data. We cannot settle for being No. 1 in funding alone; we must also excel in accountability and academic outcomes for our children. This starts with demanding transparency from the Board of Regents so that New Yorkers know exactly what they are getting for their investment in these costly and inefficient public schools.

As New York’s Public School Spending Surges, Accountability Gets Short Shrift

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