Gotham's Telltale Reading Tests

This City Journal article (http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_sndgs01.html) reinforces the cliche that there are lie, damned lies and statistics.  It slams the student progress made under Bloomberg and Klein, concluding:

Clearly, mayoral control—at least under this mayor—hasn’t improved eighth-grade reading. All these test results must be immensely disappointing to anyone who backed mayoral control as a means of boosting academic achievement. Having succeeded with the public celebration of P.S. 33’s one-year triumph, the administration probably will keep trying to sweep bad news about student performance under the rug. And the big losers of this denial of reality will be the kids, particularly those most at risk.

It does seem that there might have been something funny going on at P.S. 33, but what's important is the bigger picture: what do NYC's student gains look like, relative to other big cities in the state and nationally?  The data in the City Journal article looked very different from the data I'd seen, so I did some digging and came up with the two attached slide decks, which compare NYC data to other big NY cities using state tests and to other big U.S. cities using NAEP tests.

 

Contrary to what the City Journal article would have you believe, the data tells quite a positive story.  The state test deck shows that graduation rates are WAY up and that there have been big gains from 2002 to 2006, much more than the other four big NY state districts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers.  The actual gains are likely even greater, as the most recent tests are harder (part of an effort to more closely align state tests with NAEP).

 

The NAEP data shows strong overall performance and gains among the best of all big cities for all categories of students (all, low income, black and hispanic) for 4th grade reading.  In 4th grade math, the city's gains are roughly middle of the pack, and 8th grade reading and math is weak.  This isn't too surprising, as one would expect reforms to impact younger students more quickly.

 

 

City Journal Gotham’s Telltale Reading Tests Read ’em and weep at P.S. 33. Sol Stern Autumn 2006

One morning in May 2005, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office bused the city hall press corps to P.S. 33, an elementary school in one of the Bronx’s poorest areas. In the school’s auditorium, overflowing with happy children and teachers, the mayor proclaimed a miracle. With an enrollment 95 percent Hispanic and black, and with 100 percent of the students poor enough to qualify for free lunch, P.S. 33 had hit the jackpot on the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Over 83 percent of the school’s 140 fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), the mayor explained, compared with only 35.8 percent in 2004—an unheard-of one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The school’s terrific score was just four percentage points below the average for the richest suburban districts in the state.