City’s scores flat on nation’s report card

Test scores for New York City students showed little to no progress between 2009 and 2011 on national exams — even as students in other cities improved — while the racial achievement gaps remain as wide as they were when the mayor first took office, according to new test data released on Dec. 7.

The city’s 4th-graders scored slightly lower on both reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests while 8th-graders scored lower in math but made a slight gain in reading after flat results since 2003.

It was the first time the city’s scores have actually dropped since NAEP began reporting urban district results almost a decade ago.

“This year’s NAEP scores, combined with the city’s generally undistinguished results in prior years, is a lesson on how kids get shortchanged by school reform driven by a political agenda rather than research and evidence,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew. “We’re not going to see real and consistent improvement until the system turns its back on test prep and begins to focus on strong curriculum and letting teachers do real instruction.”

New York was one of the few large cities that participate in the urban NAEP program known as the Trial Urban District Assessment that declined in math. The other cities have also showed larger total scale-score gains over the past decade, especially in 8th grade [see charts, below].

Department of Education officials touted some reductions in the gaps between students eligible and not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch but remained silent about the fact that the achievement gaps between black and Hispanic students and their white counterparts in New York City have not narrowed to any significant degree. The city's white students scored better than black and Hispanic students by margins ranging from 22 points to 31 points, essentially the same as eight years ago.

The National Center for Education Statistics, which runs the NAEP, takes great pains to maintain the same difficulty level of the tests it gives every two years. And school districts cannot teach to the NAEP. For those reasons, it is considered the “gold standard” achievement measure, giving a truer picture of student performance than state tests and being a more reliable long-term indicator.

The overall picture it showed in New York was of an education system that has stalled in its progress and has not kept pace with the improvements in other urban districts. New York City’s students have advanced since 2003 but not as fast or as far as students in most other cities.

By NAEP’s measure, just 33 percent of 4th-graders were proficient in math this year, down from 35 percent in 2009. Only 24 percent of 8th-graders were proficient, down from 26 percent in 2009. Reading proficiency levels were unchanged at 29 percent for 4th-graders and 22 percent for 8th-graders.

That meant that most 4th-graders in the city were unable to explain a property of divisibility or label sections on a grid from a list of coordinates, though they were able to subtract two four-digit numbers. Most 8th-graders were unable to solve a story problem that involved computing with money though they were able to find the angle with a specified degree measure.

New York City’s 8th-graders were less likely to take pre-algebra or Algebra I than students of any of the other 20 cities that participated in NAEP’s urban program this year, according to a presentation by Jack Buckley, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

In reading, the city performs better. More than 60 percent of the city’s 4th-graders were able to interpret a character’s inner resolve from a brief passage, and 8th-graders identified the main purpose of an article, putting the city’s readers in the same company as the highest-performing larger cities, Austin and Charlotte.

Also, in an indicator that should warm their teachers’ hearts, New York’s 8th-graders were among the most likely to “read for fun almost every day,” a key literacy indicator, of all cities participating in NAEP’s urban program.