First, the New York State Education Department is to be congratulated on moving to a policy of truth in testing and honesty in reporting. The new state tests align with those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard in American testing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good tests. But at least they are honest.
That is the good news. Some of the rest of the news follows.
For any state, achievement on the eighth-grade reading test is a key indicator of the success, or lack of it, of the schools. By grade 8 the schools have had many years to work with their students and reading is the central skill for which schools are responsible. This year’s New York State tests show that 29 percent of New York City’s eighth-graders were reading at or above grade level. That is, 71 percent had not learned to read well enough to read, say, the articles about education in The New York Times. And just 19 percent of black and Latino students (the latter of whom may be of any race) had been taught to read at grade level.
We can also look at the results divided between those students whose family incomes are low enough to make them eligible for free or reduced price lunches and those whose families have higher incomes. Fifty-one percent of eighth-graders from higher income households were taught to read at grade level, while just 24 percent of peers from poorer homes were taught to read at proficiency. These results do no vary much between third and eighth grade.
In Manhattan’s higher-income Community School District 2, 30 percent of the district’s black and Latino students read at grade level in grade 8. In lower-income District 7 in the Bronx, just eight percent of black and Latino students were able to do so.
This brings up three important questions. The first: What is going to happen to the other 92 percent of black and Latino in the Bronx who can’t read at grade level? Two: If reading skills are only dependent on family income what value is added by the New York City Department of Education? And finally, how long is this disgraceful situation going to continue?
