Less Than Half NYC Kids At Grade Level For English, Math

NEW YORK — Most New York City public school students are not meeting standards for their grade levels in English or math despite overall improvements in standardized test scores, new exam results show.

Some 47.4 percent of third- through eighth-graders got proficient scores on their state English exams this spring, while 45.6 percent met state standards on the math exam, according to figures the State Education Department released Thursday.

Both rates are up from last year, when 46.7 percent of kids met the English standards and 42.7 met the math standards. But the numbers suggest the city's Department of Education still has a long road ahead to get its students where they need to be.

City officials attributed the modest gains in part to Mayor Bill de Blasio's Pre-K for All initiative offering free pre-kindergarten to any student who needs it.

This spring marked the first time that third-graders who had been in pre-K took the exams. The 43 percent of test-takers who had taken the classes outperformed those who had not, city officials said.

"We’re able to say in a way more definitively than ever that Pre-K for All is working," de Blasio, a Democrat, said at a news conference Thursday. "It’s reaching deep into our communities. It’s changing students’ lives. We’re achieving something that could not be done without that early start."

In addition to the year-to-year increases, the city highlighted the fact that Big Apple students outperformed the statewide English proficency rate — 45.4 percent — for the fourth straight year. The city's performance on the math exam still lags behind the statewide profiency rate of 46.7 percent, though the gap narrowed this year to 1.2 percentage points.

Third-graders did see the biggest gains in English scores. Some 53.3 percent of the 64,710 students who took the exam this spring achieved proficiency, up 2.7 points from 50.6 percent last year.

The third-grade class also scored the highest math proficiency rate at 53.2 percent, up one percentage point from last year. But fifth-graders saw the most improvement on that exam — 46.1 percent were proficient, up 4.4 percent from 2018.

Large racial gaps in test performance persist despite students narrowing those gaps this year, the figures show.

The gap between the proficency rates for white and black students was 31.6 percentage points on the English exam, compared 32.5 points last year.

The gap slimmed by 5.6 percentage points on the English test and 6.8 points on the math test among students who took Pre-K for All classes, according to de Blasio's office.

While city officials emphasized that the tests are only one measure of student success, they said the results show promise that universal pre-kindergarten can address that longstanding racial disparity.

"The opportunity gap is persistent and it plagues us in our education work, yet in New York City we’re starting to see the signs of narrowing that opportunity gap," Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said. "... This is truly a preview of coming attractions."

Charter schools continued to outperform the city's public schools on the exams. Some 57.3 percent of city charter students were proficient on the English exam, flat from last year, and 63.2 percent met standards on the math exam, up 3.6 percentage points, according to the State Education Department.