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City School Test Scores Inch Up, but Less Than Half of Students Pass

NEW YORK — Entrenched segregation, rising student homelessness and breakdowns in special education services: Mayor Bill de Blasio will face significant hurdles when it comes to improving the school system this fall.

City School Test Scores Inch Up, but Less Than Half of Students Pass

But despite these looming problems, student achievement is rising steadily in New York City. Students in elementary and middle public schools made gains on the state’s standardized English and math exams, according to data released Thursday.

About 46% of the city’s third through eighth graders passed the state math exam, a 3-percentage point increase from last year, and just more than 47% of students passed the English exam, up about 1 point compared with last year.

New York City is now inching closer to the modest milestone of half its students demonstrating proficiency in math and English.

The city performed slightly better than the rest of the state on English and is now nearly even with the rest of the state on math. Some of New York’s other cities have extremely low achievement rates: Only about 13% of students in Rochester passed the exams, though the city improved on both exams compared with last year.

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Though the mayor has railed against what he considers an overreliance on standardized exams to assess the health of the nation’s largest school system, he is keen to celebrate when scores tick up.

This is the first year that the inaugural class of students in de Blasio’s universal pre-K program took exams, and they performed slightly better than their peers last year: English pass rates rose about 3 points to 53%, and the math pass rate inched up 1 point to 53%.

But the results also showed wide gaps between how black and Hispanic students have performed compared with their white and Asian American peers: 28% of New York City’s black students passed this year’s math exam, compared with 74% of the city’s Asian American students and 67% of white students.

Those disparities have remained fixed during de Blasio’s tenure, and this year’s numbers are likely to raise fresh questions about his reluctance to implement citywide integration measures.

Students with disabilities also continued to struggle on the exams: The pass rate for students with special needs on English was flat at 16% and up about 2 points to 17.5% in math.

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The latest batch of scores, while largely encouraging, do not say much about how students have improved over time. A decade of changes to the state’s testing system have rendered years of results all but meaningless, and the new results can only be compared to last year’s, not to results from previous years.

States across the country have reevaluated their relationships to standardized exams in recent years, as a backlash to these tests has swelled in both liberal and conservative cities and towns. But New York has endured an especially turbulent process.

The state was one of the first to adopt the tougher Common Core standards, aimed at developing a challenging nationwide set of expectations for what children should learn, which were introduced by the Obama administration. But after students performed poorly on the new, Common Core-aligned exams in 2013, opposition began to brew in progressive city neighborhoods and wealthy suburbs.

In 2015, a fifth of students across the state refused to take the exams in an act of mass protest, known as “opt out,” which threatened the viability of the entire testing apparatus. The growth of the “opt out” movement has slowed in recent years, as elected officials have moved away from using exams to make determinations about schools, students and teachers.

The movement is shrinking: About 16% of students across the state refused to take exams this year, down from 18% last year.

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De Blasio rode the wave of anti-test sentiment during his 2013 campaign for mayor and set about reducing the role of exams in high-stakes decisions once he was elected. Earlier this summer, the mayor agreed to start evaluating schools based not only on their test scores or graduation rates but also on their racial and socio-economic diversity.

The rebellion against testing has recently spread from City Hall to the state Capitol.

Earlier this year, a new crop of progressive legislators backed a bill tamping down the role of test scores in teacher evaluations. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who just four years ago proposed a plan to tie half of a teacher’s rating to students’ test results, signed the bill into law without protest.

The city’s charter schools, which include some of the highest-performing schools in New York, again outperformed district schools this year, with a 63% pass rate in math and a 57% pass rate in English.

But charters’ proficiency rate on English was flat compared with last year. Even Success Academy, one of the country’s most prominent and highest-performing charter networks, saw a rare — albeit small — drop in its English pass rate this year, to 90% from 91% last year. Several Success schools still have some of the highest test scores of any school in the state.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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