{"id":359697,"date":"2026-09-29T12:12:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/359697\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T12:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:12:13","slug":"new-york-weakens-school-accountability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/359697\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Weakens School Accountability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nForwarded this email? Sign up<\/a> for free to have it sent directly to your inbox.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"City
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Good morning,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nToday, we\u2019re looking at the value of New York\u2019s Regents exam, Seattle\u2019s grocery store experiment, an interview with economist Edward Glaeser, and how to measure poverty.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nWrite to us at editors@city-journal.org<\/a> with questions or comments.<\/p>\n

\"Students<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo credit: Molly Morin \/ DigitalVision via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\nEarlier this month, the New York State Board of Regents voted to nix the Regents exams\u2014the tests that all New York high schoolers take to graduate. Students will soon be able to submit projects and portfolios instead to show their academic preparedness.<\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s not likely to end well, Neetu Arnold argues. \u201cState leaders insist that they are not dumbing down expectations,\u201d she writes, \u201cbut educators in the pilot program seem to believe that the alternative measures are less rigorous than the Regents exams.\u201d The pilot program took place at 23 schools, and the results were concerning. At one school, for instance, students talked about math in their projects, but demonstrated very little knowledge of it, with one of the teachers stating that she wasn\u2019t assessing whether students \u201cknow how to multiply.\u201d And in an English class, students were given almost a month to write song lyrics.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Regents exams avoid these issues while offering other benefits,\u201d Arnold writes. \u201cThey give students external motivation to care about their academic outcomes. They keep teachers on track. They make it harder for schools to weaken expectations just to graduate more struggling students. And they provide an efficient, transparent way to evaluate students.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nRead more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u200a<\/p>\n

\nDespite being one of America\u2019s wealthiest cities, Seattle is plagued by a lack of food stores. In response, the city government just allocated $1.7 million to help struggling independent supermarkets avoid going out of business.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe money is both more than the stressed budget should apportion and not enough to make a difference in a metropolis of nearly 400 food stores,\u201d Steven Malanga writes.<\/p>\n

\nWhat the city should be doing, Malanga argues, is tackling the problems that have made it hard for food stores to stay in business in Seattle: rising crime, filthy streets, and a soaring population of street homeless.<\/p>\n

Read here<\/a> to find out why Malanga thinks the city\u2019s efforts to address these problems aren\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nOver the past five years or so, population growth in New York City has flattened. Residents increasingly feel as though the economy no longer works for them, with shrinking job opportunities, slowing income growth, and sky-high housing prices and taxes. Now, some worry that New York may be losing its dynamism.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWithout that dynamism, New York risks becoming a museum: its buildings and institutions will remain, but its people will go elsewhere for opportunity,\u201d Adam Lehodey writes. \u201cThe city can no longer take growth for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nSo what\u2019s the path forward? Lehodey recently spoke with Edward Glaeser, a City Journal contributing editor and one of the country\u2019s most influential urban economists, about what it will take for New York City to continue to thrive. Read their conversation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nThe U.S. poverty rate has fallen to its lowest level ever recorded, but \u201crelative poverty\u201d is at an all-time high. Chris Pope argues that policymakers should be wary of treating economic inequality as synonymous with actual poverty. By that flawed metric, the United States is poorer than Mexico, and poverty declines during recessions. Relative poverty fails to measure what matters most: whether people can afford their basic needs.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe trouble with relative poverty measures, at root, is that the poor are not inherently better off if their wealthy neighbors are made poorer,\u201d Pope writes. \u201cGenerally rising affluence provides the best opportunity for the poor to prosper\u2014both through their own efforts and by expanding the assistance that others can afford to provide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nRead more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAh, the magic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: take a word that once had a definitive meaning, stretch that meaning to encompass ideas that are tangentially related but decidedly not equivalent, then insist that the word is an apt description of what you believe is occurring. See \u2018tolerance,\u2019 \u2018racism,\u2019 and now \u2018genocide\u2019 as similar examples.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 Manhattan Institute, All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forwarded this email? Sign up for free to have it sent directly to your inbox.\u00a0\u00a0 Good morning, \u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-359697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}