Some parents on the Upper East Side are talking this week about putting their apartments on the market and moving to New Jersey as they discover that the bar is higher than ever before and their fifth-graders have no chance of getting into the district’s top tier middle schools.

Until five years ago, fourth-graders had to exceed a fixed score to apply to a specialized middle-school program. That changed in 1999, when the state started administering a new standardized test and children had to score in the top 20% of fourth-graders in their district to be eligible.

That year, 61.5% of children in District 2 met or exceeded standards on the state exam in English Language Arts and 75.3% met or exceeded standards on the math exam. The cutoff for the top 20% that year was a score of 660 on each test.

Since then, scores of students in District 2 – which includes the Upper East Side and most of the rest of Manhattan below Central Park – have steadily climbed, so that in the 2003-04 school year, 75.7% of fourth-graders scored on the highest levels in English and 88.8% scored on the highest levels in math.

Even as the scores marched upward and the top 20% of students achieved increasingly higher levels on the state exams, District 2 educators continued telling parents that 660s were good enough for a fifth-grader to get into a selective middle school, several parents and education officials told The New York Sun.

This year, for the first time, Upper East Side parents are being told that a 660 – which this year means the students have met but not exceeded grade-level standards – isn’t high enough.

As one Upper East Side mother, Lisa Barness, put it: “Parents are flipping out.”

Ms. Barness, mother of a fourth-grader and a fifth-grader at the famed P.S. 6, called 660 “the traditional number you neurotically aim for your entire elementary school career.”

She said that last November she asked the fourth-grade teacher if her older child, Ethan, needed tutoring. The teacher assured Ms. Barness that her son would definitely achieve the necessary score of 660 – and he did, scoring a 664 on the English Language Arts test and a 662 on the math test.

In the past week, however, Ms. Barness has learned Ethan was about 25 points shy of what District 2 middle schools are calling the new standard. Had she known, the mother said, she would have shelled out hundreds of dollars for private tutoring.

“You can’t raise the bar like this. It’s changing the rules mid-game,” she said, adding, “I feel like we’re being punished as a result of the scores going up.”

Ms. Barness said she’s already considering pulling her son from public school and sending him to private school. As soon as she figures out what to do for Ethan, who is 10, she plans to find a tutor for her younger child, Lea, 9, who is a fourth-grader this year at P.S. 6.

Another P.S. 6 mother, who asked to remain anonymous, moved to the Upper East Side 10 years ago when she was pregnant with her son. She wanted her child to attend P.S. 6 and then the specialized program at Wagner Middle School, which is located three blocks from their apartment. When she found out her son scored 660s on the tests, she figured her plan was working and congratulated him.

As she’s started contacting middle schools, though, her hopes have been dashed. Wagner told the woman her son’s scores weren’t high enough for the specialized program. The Salk School of Science said the same. When she contacted East Side Middle School, someone asked her for her child’s scores and said if they weren’t 685s there was no reason to tour the school, let alone apply.

“Last weekend, I was already on the Web, looking at homes in New Jersey,” she said. “I don’t want to move, but I’m in a real dilemma.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Michele McManus, said: “The intention was always to offer eligibility to the top approximately 20% of District 2 students. As performance has increased, the scale score representing the top 20% of District 2 students has also increased.”

This year, she said, even the District 2 average was above a 660.

“We encourage parents to set up meetings with their schools’ guidance counselors to discuss whether it is realistic for their children to apply to a screened program,” she said.

City Council Member Eva Moskowitz, a P.S. 6 alumna who represents the district and leads the council’s Committee on Education, said she doesn’t think it’s fair to change standards – even if they’re only perceived standards – after the fact.

“First, they need to investigate exactly what happened,” Ms. Moskowitz said. “Did someone at the region or at the school level miscommunicate to the parents?

“And if that is the case,” she said, “I just think you have to go with the standard that parents were told, and you can change it next year.”

Ms. Moskowitz said people make “serious financial and educational decisions” based on the fourth-grade tests, and she said, “It’s got to be very clear what the standards are.”