There's another, unimpeachable source undermining the Bloomberg administration's claims: the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. The NAEP has served as the federal Education Department's "above politics" testing agency since 1990, with its fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math tests often described as the "nation's report card."
The NAEP administered its 2005 fourth-grade reading tests within weeks of the New York state tests, and the results clearly showed that New York education officials -- city and state -- have indulged in unwarranted self-congratulation about student achievement. Compared with the nearly 60% of New York City students reaching proficiency on the state test, only 22% of city kids reached the comparable NAEP level. Also, the NAEP showed no upward movement toward proficiency for New York City students since 2003, the last time it tested them.
In other words, not only were the city's fourth-graders reading at a shamefully low level, the mayoral reforms had produced no significant academic improvement.
With media attention focused on the Bloomberg administration's claims about fourth-grade scores, almost no one paid attention to student performance data for the school system's upper levels.
Not only did Gotham's eighth-graders score abysmally in reading on the state test -- dropping 2.5 points to 32.8% -- and the NAEP, but their math results were stagnant -- and crummy -- on both tests. And only 20% of city students met the not very high eighth-grade state proficiency standard in social studies (the NAEP has no social studies test). Also, under Bloomberg, the percentage of city eighth-graders meeting state science standards has plummeted from 54% to 45%.
The picture of student achievement during the first Bloomberg term is coming into clearer focus -- and it's not pretty. Aside from fourth-grade math, stagnation or decline has marked every important benchmark test from the early grades to high school exit exams. But the prospects for real education reform suffer terrible damage when a taxpayer-funded public relations juggernaut gets away with spinning poor test outcomes as "historic" in order to improve a mayor's electoral prospects. Dare we ask whether mayoral control might actually have undermined democratic accountability in the schools and made things worse?
