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Math scores rose across New York City public schools last school year while English scores ticked down, according to state test results released Wednesday by city officials.
Among students in grades 3-8, 53.4% were considered proficient or above in math, an increase of 3.5 percentage points. The share of children considered to be reading on grade level slipped to 49.1% — a 2.6 point decrease.
The dip in English scores comes at a pivotal moment, as schools Chancellor David Banks’ top priority is to raise literacy rates. He has required all elementary schools to use one of three approved reading programs. City officials acknowledged that the curriculum overhaul — which began in just under half of the city’s local districts last year and will roll out to all schools this fall — might have negatively affected test scores as teachers were getting used to unfamiliar materials.
A Chalkbeat analysis found that districts that began using the new curriculums last school year saw average proficiency rates drop by 3.5 percentage points. In districts that were not covered by the curriculum mandate, the drop was slightly smaller, at 2.8 percentage points. An analysis conducted by the Education Department shows similar trends.
Those figures only include students in grades 3-5, as middle schools have not been universally required to change reading curriculums. (Students who score a 3 on the state tests are considered proficient, while a 4 is above proficiency.)
“Significant change does not happen overnight, and the slight decline in [English] test scores represents a transitional period as our school system adjusts to a new method of instruction,” Banks said in a statement. City officials said other states that have pursued curriculum overhauls have also seen initial test score declines.
Still, experts said that aggregate test scores should be interpreted with caution, as many other variables besides the curriculum changes could push scores up or down, such as fluctuations in federal COVID relief funding and elevated rates of chronic absenteeism. The Education Department did not randomly select which schools were required to overhaul their curriculums in the first phase of the rollout.
The state test scores should be used “as only a rough indicator of students’ performance and not in any way as a decisive evaluation or referendum” on the curriculum overhaul, said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who has studied school performance and accountability systems. “When there’s multiple things changing at once, it’s really, really hard to isolate the impact of a curriculum change.”
Officials pointed to data from a separate battery of assessments that the city delivered to students in grades K-2 last spring that showed an uptick in reading scores compared with the year before as a sign of improvement. But those statistics also show that the scores among schools that adopted the new curriculums rose slightly less than schools that were not part of the curriculum mandate. Officials said the differences were not statistically significant.
Susan Neuman, a New York University professor who has supported the curriculum changes, said that while the city’s assessment data seemed more encouraging, it is too early to draw conclusions. “I don’t think it is valid” to use the state test scores to assess the curriculum mandate so far, she said. “I’m not concerned” about the decline, she added.
For his part, Pallas was skeptical that the city’s assessment data, based on a screener from a company called Acadience, could reveal much about policy implementation since it is typically used to identify individual students who are struggling so schools can deploy extra help.
“I fully understand the impulse of the city to crow about numbers that seem to be going up,” Pallas said. “But there, too, I think that has very little to do with the curricular changes that we are seeing.”
The state test scores released Wednesday came out months earlier than in recent years, which city officials said was due to state education officials giving them the green light to release local scores earlier. Scores were delayed until the fall last year as state officials developed cut scores for the new exam, but in 2022 and 2021, the data was released in late September and late October, respectively.
The scores continued to reveal disparities between different student groups.
About 70% of Asian American students and nearly 66% of white students scored proficient or above on English exams compared with nearly 39% of Black students and about 36% of Latino children. About 21% of students with disabilities were considered to be on grade level.
In math, almost 80% of Asian American children and just over 72% of white children were proficient, compared with about 38% of Black students and nearly 40% of Latino ones. Math proficiency rates were much lower for students with disabilities, at just over 27%.
The figures released Wednesday do not include charter schools.
More broadly, the state’s standardized tests have undergone a series of changes in recent years, making it difficult at times to compare data from one school year to the next. In 2020, for example, the exams were canceled due to the start of the COVID pandemic, and the following year they were reinstated but made optional for students across the state.
In 2023, students for the first time took a new exam aligned with the Next Generation Learning Standards, which were established after revisions to the controversial Common Core. Earlier this year, the city’s fifth and eighth graders took a computer-based model of those exams, as the state continues its multiyear phase-in of computer-based testing.
And across the city, an additional 185 schools opted into digital English exams for some portion of their third, fourth, sixth, or seventh graders, while 166 schools did so for math.
City data showed a larger drop in the share of fifth and eighth graders who scored proficient in reading on the most recent exams when compared to the city’s 3-8 grade students as a whole. While some studies have found students tend to do worse on exams taken on a computer or tablet, research isn’t definitive. Many states have already switched over to a computer-based model, but there have been different outcomes across the country.
City officials said they were “not able to confidently disentangle the impact of computer-based testing versus other factors” on students’ scores.
Still, the tests can be helpful for schools and districts, informing instructional decisions and assisting in the development of individual student learning plans.
Curious about school-level test results? Here is a searchable breakdown of math and English scores across all of the city’s public schools.
Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.
Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org
