May 23, 2007 -- The share of New York City students reading and writing at grade level fell in the elementary grades but rose in middle school this year, closing the gap on a worrisome trend of declining performance as students get older.
But the results of the 2006-07 statewide reading exams for Grades 3 through 8 released yesterday presented education officials with the unusual challenge of explaining why middle-school students posted greater gains than their younger counterparts. Eighth-graders showed the largest improvement over last year, with 41.8 percent of them deemed proficient - a 5.2-point jump.
Conversely, the test found 56.4 percent of third-graders to be at grade level - a 5.1-point drop. Both the state and the city attributed the results to a new federal requirement mandating that students with limited English skills take the state exam if they have been in the school system for at least one year.
Previously, the city and other school districts had waited three years before requiring such students to take the test.
Students with limited English accounted for 13 percent of the 428,143 test-takers this year, compared to just 6 percent last year.
Almost 70 percent of all students learning English across the state reside in New York City.
At a news briefing, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said students in general were better prepared to enter middle school, and challenged the logic of the federal mandate.
"If a student isn't yet speaking English, it doesn't seem to me an intelligent thing to assess whether they can pass [an English Language Arts] test," he said.
Overall, the proportion of city students deemed proficient went virtually unchanged, at 50.8 percent.
Statewide, the proportion climbed almost 2 points, to 63.4 percent.
The proportion of sixth- and seventh-graders to meet standards inched up to 49.7 and 45.4 percent, respectively, while the share of fourth- and fifth-graders on par dipped slightly, to 56 and 56.1 percent respectively.
When students with limited English were factored into the equation, however, scores climbed across the board except for third grade, where they remained flat.
Teachers-union President Randi Weingarten applauded the middle-school gains, but blasted the federal requirement and criticized the state for not fighting the mandate.
"It was a wrong decision for the federal government to require students be tested in English when they weren't ready," Weingarten said. "If that misguided decision hadn't been made, then you'd have a goodnews story here."
Good news, bad news, it didn't matter much at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies in Manhattan, where a whopping 96.7 percent of the 184 eighth-graders met standards.
Eighth-grader Gabriel Eisenberg, 13, credited his teachers' dedication and a rich reading curriculum that included authors like John Steinbeck, George Orwell and Mark Twain.
"I think the teachers were really good," he said. "They spent extra time preparing us."
Additional reporting by Tatiana Deligiannakis
