“Schools and students went through and overcame many difficulties during the pandemic. But for the Governor and her Education Department to pretend that these new statistics somehow indicate a higher quality of education for our kids, particularly for our minority communities for whom we know the impact of school closures was disproportionate, is ridiculous. We should not rely on statistics from a year that caused so much disruption to education to give us insights on how well our schools are doing at educating our kids.

“It is pretty easy to artificially inflate graduation rates when you don't know if kids showed up to school or learned anything when they did. It’s easy to give someone a diploma when we change grading to pass/no pass. These standards simply reflect a lower standard. “The only way to have an accurate look at how our kids are learning is to get them back into the classroom with regular instruction. Additionally, we must do all we can to make sure teachers get voluntarily vaccinated.”