That'll learn 'em!

The results of Lord Mayor Bloomberg’s grand experiment in forced mathematical learning have arrived, and the results are shocking:

Apparently if you require public school teachers to use testing as the one and only metric for learning in New York City, if you stake your political credibility on getting those scores up, if you even try to break the teacher’s union over their acceptance of scores as a metric on their efficacy as teachers…NOTHING HAPPENS!

See this article in New York Times today:

“New York City’s fourth and eighth graders showed no notable improvement on federal math exams this year compared with 2007, the last time the tests were given, according to scores released on Tuesday.

Worse yet, this is an improvement in city scores only. Look what the Times had to say about federal and state scores:

On the state exams, 71 percent of the city’s eighth graders met state standards this year, but just 26 percent were considered proficient or better on the federal exams. In 2007, 22 percent of eighth-grade students in the city were proficient.

For this we elected Michael Bloomberg God?