City's test gains outpace state's, but performance remains low

A first look at state test score data confirms good news for New York City: The city’s test scores gains exceeded those across the state.

According to data released today, 43.9 percent of city students in grades 3-8 met the proficiency standard in reading and 57.3 percent hit the math proficiency standard. That’s compared to 42.4 percent and 54 percent in 2010, the first year after state officials raised the bar to reach that rating.

Statewide, reading scores dropped by a tiny amount — 0.4 percentage points — to 52.8 percent proficient, and math scores rose by 2.3 points, to 63.3 percent proficient.

State officials sounded a somber tone in their press release announcing the scores. “While the majority of students statewide met or exceeded the state’s proficiency standards in both math and ELA, overall performance remains low and the gaps in achievement persist,” the press release said.

Mayor Bloomberg is likely to point to city students’ relative performance during his press conference later today.

But the big story this year is not the scores but the tests themselves. After mounting criticism that the state tests were creating an illusory picture of increasing performance, state education leaders in 2010 reversed their defensive pose and joined the critics. They rolled out a plan to raise standards over time to measure students against what they called “college readiness.”

This year’s tests added more multiple-choice questions and required essays of all students. The state also stopped releasing past test questions to make new questions harder to predict. And the state retained Daniel Koretz, a Harvard professor who was once one of the sharpest critics of New York’s accountability system, to study whether New York suffers from “score inflation.”