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

NEW YORK — The majority of New York City's public school students still aren't meeting state standards in English and math despite modest gains in standardized test performance, new figures show.

The State Education Department released test results for school districts across the state Wednesday, several weeks later than usual. Some 46.7 percent of the city's third- through eighth-graders achieved proficient scores on this year's state English exam, slightly above the statewide rate of 45.2 percent, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said.

The city still trails the state on the math exam with just 42.7 percent of students meeting proficiency standards, compared with 44.5 percent statewide.

The city's numbers showed improvement from last year, but indicate there's still a long way to go to get its public school students up to speed.

De Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, said the results create a baseline on which the city can build going forward. Changes to this year's tests, such as trimming testing from three days to two and better aligning the questions to educational standards, don't allow for a direct comparison with last year's numbers, city schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said.

"We just don’t have enough evidence in this new interpretation of the test to tell us everything we want," de Blasio said at a news conference.

De Blasio's office nonetheless noted that this was the third straight year in which the city outpaced the state in English proficiency. The gap between the city's and the state's math proficiency rates also narrowed to 1.8 percentage points from 2.4 last year, according to the mayor's office.

But the new results show roughly half as many black and Hispanic students passing the tests as their white and Asian peers.

Some 34 percent of black students and 36 percent of Hispanic students showed proficiency on the English exam, compared with 67.2 percent of Asian students and 66.5 percent of white students, according to figures released by the mayor's office.

The math results show an even larger gap, with just 25.4 percent of black students achieving proficiency — just over a third of the rate for Asian students (72.2 percent).

"I will be the Scrooge in the conversation and say we still have an opportunity gap, not only in New York City but in the state of New York, where the education attainment by different groups of students is predictable by who those students are in terms of their ethnic group," Carranza said. "That's not OK."

Other indicators, though, show clearer improvements in the city's largest-in-the-nation public school system, de Blasio said.

The high school graduation rate hit a record high of 74.3 percent and the dropout rate fell to a record-low 7.8 percent for the class of 2017, the mayor's office said. De Blasio said his universal pre-kindergarten programs should lead to even more progress in the coming years.

Officials said standardized tests are just one tool among many used to measure student performance.

"This tells us something, it doesn’t tell us everything," de Blasio said.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio gives an education-related speech in The Bronx in September 2015. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)