Reading Scores Rise For City’s Eighth-Graders

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Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is hailing the city’s performance on statewide reading tests, even as the results released yesterday showed that only half of the third- to eighth-graders tested were reading at grade level or higher.

The statewide reading tests were administered for the first time in January to students in grades three through eight — not just the fourth and eighth grades as in the past. The results also showed a steady decline between the third and eighth grades in the percentage of students reading at grade level. The decline got steeper between grades six and eight.

Mr. Klein lauded the performance of New York City students on the tests, citing improvements. In 2006, 36.6% of eighth-graders met or exceeded the reading standard, up from 32.8% of eighth-graders who met the standard in 2005. The percentage of fourth-graders reading at grade level dropped slightly between 2005 and 2006, to 58.9% from 59.5%, but Mr. Klein and state officials said a more difficult test this year accounted for the poorer performance.

“I think we’re seeing real results,”Mr. Klein said. “We’re the only part of the state that’s up in any significant way.”

Mr. Klein noted that with 50.7% of all the students tested meeting standards, New York City had done better than students in other large cities in the state, such as Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Yonkers, where only 37.3% of students met standards. In the state as a whole, 61.5% of students met the standards.

In New York City, the number of students who scored a one on the four-point scale, demonstrating serious academic problems, was 11.4%. For both fourth and eighth grades, the percentage of students scoring a one went up from 2005. In the fourth grade, 11.8% of those tested scored a one, up from 7.8% in 2005. In the eighth grade, 14.1% of those tested scored a one, up from 10.4% in 2005.

Addressing the downward spiral from grades three to eight, Mr. Klein said the problem was not unique to New York City.

“This is nothing new, this has been a national trend,” he said. “I think our middle school trend is positive.”

He added that the Department of Education was working on improving student achievement in grades six through eight with the creation of smaller middle-schools and more professional development for the teachers of those grades.

The state education commissioner, Richard Mills, who released the scores during a press conference in Albany yesterday, said he was very concerned about the trend. While acknowledging that the phenomenon is not limited to New York, he said, “That is not inevitable, that is not a trend you see in all school districts.”

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, also expressed concern about the downward sloping scores of middle school students. She suggested that smaller class sizes in middle school would help solve the problem.

The test results were released nearly nine months after students took the test, a delay that Mr. Klein lamented because he said it limited opportunities to help students before they started school again this year. From a preliminary analysis of the scores released yesterday, Mr. Klein said more children probably would have gone to summer school if the scores had been available last June.

“I wish we’d had them sooner,” Mr. Klein said.

A spokesman for the state education department, Jonathan Burman, said that the scores took much longer to tabulate because this year was the first year six grades were tested instead of two.

“This is a huge endeavor,” he said. “The point was to make sure everything was accurate.”

He said that next year, scores will be released before June.

The director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Robert Tobias, a former director of testing for the city, said gains in student achievement over the past few years should be praised. But he said a longer look into the past was sobering.

“There really hasn’t been much change,” Mr. Tobias said, noting that in 2006 eighth graders had gained only one percentage point over eighth graders who took the test in 1999, when the statewide reading tests were first administered.

“This is a performance level that students should be able to achieve,” he said. “It’s disconcerting that only half the students are meeting that expectation.”


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