When there is both good news and bad news in a story the element to put in the lead is the bad news, we were taught long ago by an editor whose spirit, no doubt, was guiding our hand when we wrote the headline on the education story yesterday to the effect that reading scores for New York City were mixed. Indeed they were, but our friends at the Department of Education reckon our headline missed the news. They see it as the fact that when one compares apples-to-apples, reading scores went up at every grade level except grade 3 (which was steady), with the range of increase between +2 and +7.9, with the average being up+2.8. The department reckons this, coupled with gains in graduation rates announced on Monday, shows consistent progress.
The results cited above control for changes in the testing policies of New York State in the area of English Language Arts. The new policy now mandates that English-language learners take the ELA test if they have spent only one year in school. This is more demanding than in past years, which tends to depress the latest scores. But even without controlling for the changes in policy, the scores of New York City students rose in grades six, seven and eight. The chancellor, Joel Klein, feels this is quite significant.
That roughly half of pupils are still below grade level in reading is called by the Department of Education "not remotely satisfactory." On that we certainly agree. But when the Bloomberg administration acceded in 2002, the grade 3 through grade 8 reading average was 39.3% at or above grade level. Now it is at 50.8%. That's still lower than the statewide average of 63.4%. The city points out that it is better than the state's other cities, such as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. But it could also be pointed out that the scores for the city's government-run schools are lower than at some of the standout charter schools, such as the Carl Icahn Charter School in the Bronx, where 94% of fourth graders passed the test, or the Kipp Academy charter school in the Bronx, where 90% of seventh graders passed the test.
There's a certain amount of salesmanship in all of this. If the school officials can create a sense of progress, more middle-class families will choose to send their children to public schools, morale among students and teachers will improve, and scores will probably go up even more. In Chicago last year, Mayor Daley boasted that 66% of students passed the eighth grade math test, up from a 33% pass rate the year before. But the gains came, the Sun-Times reported, "after state officials lowered the passing score from the 67th to the 38th percentile."
While newspapers are supposed to lead with the bad news, we're also happy to mark the progress the Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have been making in educating our children. It's worth noting, however, that the day after they announced their gains, a self-described atheist, Robert W. Wilson, who was trained as a statistician and made a fortune on Wall Street, announced plans to give $22.5 million to the Catholic parochial schools run by the Archdiocese of New York. Mr. Wilson no doubt understands the progress being made by the government monopoly schools, but can also understand that it comes as spending on them, wrested from the taxpayers, has grown during the Bloomberg administration, by the narrowest possible definition, to $15.4 billion a year from $11.7 billion a year, a 32% increase, so that the government now spends more than double what the Catholic schools spend on each student, to achieve worse results on standardized tests with a similar student population.
So by all means, put the latest round of scores in context. But if the results are so stellar, why not drop the opposition to vouchers? That would let parents decide for themselves, on an apples-to-apples basis in terms of price, whether to choose the product that Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein are selling.
