The New York State grades 3-8 English Language Arts test scores from last spring were released yesterday.  This NYT article highlights the continuing good news from NYC, thanks (in my opinion) largely to the reforms Bloomberg and Klein are implementing:

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said that since 2002, New York City had outperformed other urban districts and made better progress than the state as a whole. And though he said much work had to be done, he was thrilled with the results. “I think that the work we are doing is powerful,” he said at a news conference.

New York State’s other big cities — Yonkers, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse — all showed more substantial declines in fourth grade performance. New York City also showed a solid increase in the percentage of eighth graders meeting the state standards, outpacing a slight increase statewide.

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September 22, 2006

N.Y. English Scores Drop Sharply in 6th Grade

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/nyregion/22scores.html

The share of students in New York State who are reading and writing at grade level drops sharply between the fifth and sixth grades and keeps declining through middle school, according to the first results of a new state testing system adopted to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law’s requirements for tracking year-to-year progress.

The scores for the 2005-6 school year, which were released yesterday by the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, also showed an increase in the proportion of students in the state performing at the lowest level.