The Buffalo Board of Ed passed a resolution last week saying the state’s new math tests (as a part of NCLB) are extremely unfair because state officials didn’t give Buffalo schools enough early warning that they were supposed to actually be teaching their kids math. Blind-sided, they were. Now that the board understands that math is kind of an important subject, they’ll try to make it happen. But for gosh-sakes, they shouldn’t be held responsible for bad test scores in the mean time, since they seriously didn’t know it was part of the deal. (Blame for this should probably be aimed at whomever came up with the “Three R’s” thing, and for not making it clear to Buffalo public school leaders that two of the R’s don’t actually start with the letter R.) This is the same board that thankfully doesn’t want to sponsor charter schools.

Also in “math news that doesn’t add up” today: The NY Post’s Dave Andreatta notes that never before has the state required students to answer so few questions correctly on the Regents Math A exam as this year. Kids who took the exam last week only need 23 out of 84 points, or about 27%, to be told how wonderful they are.

NOTE: Please notice The Chalkboard’s remarkable restraint in not commenting on the, um, interesting photo the Post used to accompany this story.