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Grades in New York City public schools are becoming increasingly meaningless as teachers and principals continue to promote close to 100% of students despite nearly half not being proficient in math or reading.
“There are no consequences for poor performance so school staff has no incentive to give a fair grade,” Manhattan Institute Fellow Danyela Egorov said.
“New York has the highest per-pupil spending in the country, if people saw how badly students were actually doing, it would be difficult to justify to the taxpayer,” she added.
The DOE promoted 99.6% of students in grades 3-8 in 2024-2025, even though only 57% of NYC 3-8 graders were proficient in math, a number that mysteriously skyrocketed from 43% in 2018, according to state test data.
Teachers who give their students inflated grades are often trying to avoid scrutiny, Brooklyn College Professor Emeritus David Bloomfield told The Post.
“A teacher gives his student a high grade, everybody’s happy, he gives a student a low grade, the teaching is in question, the burden of teaching more and better, attendance is a question, working hard or better is in play,” Bloomfield said.
Egorov said that teachers unions, far-left politicians and woke educrats are all to blame for the scourge of grade inflation in city schools.
“The message we’re constantly getting from the Regents board is lower standards,” she said.
In September, the Regents board moved to eliminate the requirement that students pass the Regents exams to graduate.
At a hearing that month, state Board of Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams claimed that the Regents were unnecessary and likened students who fared poorly on the tests to fish being measured on how they perform on land.
“You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees,” she said.
The effects of grade inflation can be devastating for families.
City Council on High Schools member Adriana Aviles tearfully confronted Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels on Monday with a heart-wrenching story about how her son was given straight A’s in math his whole life only for him to be unable to do fractions or algebra in high school.
NYC public schools have largely moved away from rigor and objective metrics of student performance post-COVID — which makes teachers’ grades the be-all and end-all when students apply to many advanced programs in the city.
“A lot of teachers feel that if they give their students a poor grade, they’ll be preventing them from having access to educational opportunities,” she said.
Egorov said the biggest factor motivating teachers to hand out phony, inflated grades is to hide the abject failure of the left’s agenda to level the playing field.
“For years they said schools need to be fully funded, and now they are fully funded and students are still failing. If they didn’t inflate their grades, it would be impossible to justify.”
And parents may be slowly wising up.
A study by Learning Heroes found that 88% of parents believe their children are at or above grade level in math, down from 97% when the survey was last commissioned in 2022.
A New York State Education Department spokesperson said that many states are moving away from “high-stakes testing.”
“Equity in education is not about lowering standards. It’s about ensuring that every student, regardless of background, has the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in meaningful ways,” the spokesperson said.
