Into The Tunnels: Exploring The Underside Of NYC by Jacki Lyden - NPR

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Steve Duncan lives dangerously. The urban explorer goes underground, examining the hidden infrastructure of major cities all over the world — their tunnels, subways, sewers.

In New York City, his favorite underground adventure, he could drown when the tide comes in or succumb to toxic gases in the sewers. He could be hit by a train or step on the third rail. And if he gets caught, he would be so under arrest.

So why does he do it? If you could have followed Alice down that rabbit hole, or Jules Verne to the center of the Earth, or gone to see the mandrake god in Pan’s Labyrinth, wouldn't you do it? It's seductive. It's mysterious. It's what lies beneath.

Duncan, 32, is a graduate of Columbia University working on his doctorate in urban history at the University of California. He looks like a human sparkler, with a shock of white-blond hair.

Call him what you will — including crazy. But while you sleep, he's plunged far below the city surface — headlamp on, an urban mole, exploring the nether regions of New York.

Producer Brent Baughman and I followed Duncan — not down every manhole, but, hey, we stood anxiously beside a few — on a journey through 25 miles of New York City underground.

Courtesy of Steve Duncan

Steve Duncan, an urban explorer who has examined the hidden infrastructure of major cities all over the world, emerges from a manhole in New York City.

Exploring What Lies Beneath

Duncan, master of the "Undercity" (you can find his photographs at Undercity.org), had arranged a trek with Nordic explorer Erling Kagge. Kagge, who is in his late 40s, has completed the trifecta: He has summitted Everest, hiked the South Pole, and he was the first man to walk alone to the North Pole. He's killed a charging polar bear with a shot from a handgun.

Looking a bit like Thor, Kagge showed up in a cherry-red sweater with a big white furry heart.

"I'm always asking myself why I can't remain sitting in my chair," he said, changing into some webbed long underwear at midnight on a freezing Bronx street corner. "I'm not always waiting for the answer. I think most people underrate the possibilities to fulfill their own dreams. So I think much more is possible in life than people seem to believe. We're all born explorers."

He called the underground hike a trip "through New York's subconscious."

We waited in the snow as the explorers descended below, along with a videographer and a New York Times reporter. The men climbed over a wall and lowered themselves into a freezing stream flowing into a culvert. They vanished. They would have to walk 30 or 40 blocks, with their waders on, to a climb out of the previously scouted manhole on the residential street in the Bronx where we would be waiting. A colleague of Duncan’s patrolled with us.

One hour passed. Then two. Then three.

"Mole men, this is topside, come in!" spotter Will Hunt called into his radio over and over. Just after 5 a.m., they emerged, filthy and elated. They had been in beautiful, double-barreled brick sewers built in the 1890s. But there had been some water problems; Duncan jettisoned leaking waders.

Then, it was off to cross the Harlem River to the subway, head back south and find a place to sleep. We had sleeping bags and backpacks. We needed warmth. Columbia University, Duncan's alma mater, was the target.

Courtesy of Steve Duncan

Duncan took this self-portrait in New York City's Croton Aqueduct in 2006.

'The Big Thing Here Is Not To Get Killed'

Employees filling vending machines in Buell Hall didn't give us a second glance as we headed downstairs to the basement. Steam tunnels below the university were made famous in the 1968 student sit-in. Duncan jimmied a locked door with a knife, and we wormed through darkness and beside pipes into a coffin-sized passageway next to heating ducts and the boiler. Oh, to be warm and dry — if dusty.

Each explorer seemed to sleep like a stone. Breakfast was bourbon and cough drops at 4 p.m. — for strength. Then, we climbed back up and emerged into the philosophy department — during the faculty Christmas party. Backpacks and hiking boots didn't quite fit the dress code, so we retreated back into the night, reluctantly.

The second night out was beginning, and after a brief stop at the New York Athletic Association on swanky 59th Street — an underground river runs beneath the building — we ended up somewhere off Delancey Street, contemplating visiting abandoned subway stations. By now, it was after 1 a.m.

Unfortunately, the subways I saw were nowhere near as abandoned as I'd expected. There were no express trains, but we had to avoid service trains and other, unscheduled locals. Duncan gave this inspiring speech:

"The big thing here is not to get killed. So don't touch the third rail. If a train's coming, get out of the way. That might mean — in the worst situation I can imagine — that might mean standing in between two third rails and two pillars with trains coming on either side of you. You will get seen, but you won't get killed."

We walked stealthily, single file like a special-ops team, until he halted.

"I could have sworn I saw a guy over there," he whispered. And then we were running. Was a train coming? Were we being chased? I was at the end; who knew? I heard a loud police whistle. A worker? A security guard? A cop? We ran. At a subway platform, to the astonishment of passengers, the men hauled me up, backpack and all. Why were we doing this? Well, this part may have been a miscalculation, Duncan said.

Courtesy of Steve Duncan

The Canal Street Sewer in Manhattan, New York's first covered sewer, was roofed over circa 1812 — previously, it was an open ditch (the "Canal" of Canal Street).

"It was a little nerve-wracking tonight," he admitted. "But I think there's a lot of really fantastic parts of the city’s infrastructure that are not morally bad to experience. I'm not doing immoral things down here, and I think these things help people see the city for what it is: a fascinating place that's grown over time. But you try to explain that to a cop arresting you and you're not going to get very far."

In 2001, a SWAT team swarmed him on the roof of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and nabbed him.

That's the dilemma of this kind of urban exploration — of seeing things most people will never see.

The 'Mole People,' And Another Close Call

Kagge, who is writing a book about happiness, wanted to interview the "Mole People" who live off the Amtrak tunnel below Riverside Drive. One of them, Brooklyn, lives in an "igloo," as she put it — a sort of dump beneath the tracks, which were lined with mural after mural of intense, weird graffiti.

"What do you think people above ground do wrong in life?" Kagge asked her.

"It's called appreciate what you got," Brooklyn said. "And hold on to it. And don't lose it. I don't know why people are miserable — they got everything that I don't have. And I'm happier than them."

Soon, she burst into Sister Sledge's "We Are Family."

After that, the explorers went on to crawl below Canal Street in lower Manhattan, in an old sewer they entered through a manhole. It was so narrow, they were soon lying flat. Rats and cockroaches ran past their heads. Raw sewage splashed them. They showed up at my flat at 7 a.m., frozen and happy and very, very filthy. But apart from a little scrubbing up, there was no stopping.

The last leg of the journey was through Queens. They had now been in nearly every borough of New York, and Duncan and Kagge wanted to hike through a storm sewer that emptied into Jamaica Bay. The manhole was in a forest in Queens. They popped the lid, climbed down rusted ladder runs — and walked into the Atlantic.

"It was pretty scary ... the tide came in about an hour earlier than I expected and I got wet to my waist. But it was awesome," Duncan said.

Kagge, the polar explorer, termed it "a proper expedition" — from the North Bronx all the way out to the Atlantic.

"It's been superb," he said.

And I'd agree.

Crowley, Vallone, De Blasio Announce Study that Shows Firehouses Save New Yorkers $3.1 Billion Annually...

Crowley says: “The FDNY is the best deal going when it comes to getting bang for your buck."

Council Member Elizabeth Crowley (D-Queens), Chair of the Fire & Criminal Justice Committee, and Council Member Peter Vallone (D-Queens), Chair of the Public Safety Committee, today were joined on the steps of City Hall by Public Advocate Bill De Blasio (D-Brooklyn), Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy and Uniformed Fire Officers Association President Alexander Hagan to make public a comprehensive study by Columbia University and the FDNY that indicates how much money taxpayers will lose by closing even one of the 20 jeopardized fire companies, as proposed by Mayor Bloomberg to balance the City’s budget. Commissioned and approved by the FDNY, the 2009 Columbia University Capstone Project: FDNY Property Saved Indicator concluded the FDNY saves at least $3.1 billion in property damage annually. The operating budget for the Department is only $1.5 billion.

"This study shows that the FDNY is the best deal going when it comes to getting bang for your buck,” said Fire & Criminal Justice Committee Chair Elizabeth Crowley. “As the City negotiates the budget, New Yorkers are getting a two-to-one return on their investment in the fire department. This study calculates that the FDNY saves at least $3.1 billion in property damage alone and if you divide that among the 198 engine companies citywide, each company is responsible for roughly $15.6 million in property saved annually. If we close even one company, who will pick up the slack for the $15.6 million in property damage? If we close 20 fire companies, can we afford the $313 million in property damage? The message is clear: we simply cannot afford to reduce our already overstretched fire protection because fires don’t care about budgets."

“The study now proves – fires do not only burn holes in our buildings but in our City’s budget as well,” said City Public Safety Committee Chair Peter F. Vallone Jr.

"It is precisely in these tough times that our City needs to show what our priorities are,” said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “The number one responsibility of government is to keep the public safe - period. The current economic environment obliges us to make tough decisions, but that should mean making sacrifices to preserve public safety, instead of jeopardizing it."

Captain Alexander Hagan, President of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, said, “The Capstone Study, done in conjunction with six high-ranking Fire Officers, proves to an absolute certainty that closing firehouses is civic insanity. Every engine company is worth far more than 10 times its cost to the citizens of New York City.”

UFA President Steve Cassidy said, "This study clearly illustrates that in addition to New York City Firefighters most important job, saving lives, Firefighters save the taxpayers over $3 billion in property damage annually with our ability to quickly respond to and extinguish fires."

City Comptroller John C. Liu said, “New Yorkers hate budget cuts, but what they hate more are budget cuts while there is waste in government. Especially at a time when our City remains the number one terror target in the world, further efforts should be made to minimize the dismantling of fire companies.”

The study was completed in 2009 by Columbia University graduate students of the School of International and Public Affairs, in close cooperation with high-ranking chiefs of the Fire Department.

2009 Columbia University Capstone Project: FDNY Property Saved Indicator

In Queens, Nation’s Only High School Cricket League Thrives by Regina Galea - The Columbia Journalist

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When the spring sports season began last year at John Adams High School in Ozone Park, Queens, Thakur Singh, then a junior, was planning to join the baseball team. Singh, who had lived in Guyana and Antigua until the age of eight, already played in two local cricket leagues and wanted to branch out.

Then one day Alex Navarrete, one of John Adams High’s coaches, stopped Singh in the hallway and told him about the cricket team being formed at the school. “He told me, ‘You’re going to be my captain,’ ” Singh recalled.

The John Adams Spartans were one of the first 14 teams to participate in the Public School Athletic League’s (PSAL) 2008 varsity cricket program, the only one of its kind in the nation. The PSAL, which organizes competitive sports in the New York public school system, just completed its second full cricket season with 23 teams made up of approximately 400 students, mostly from immigrant families, from across New York City.

The Spartans qualified for the league finals two years in row. With 227 runs and 19 wickets, Singh won this year’s Windgate Award as the top high school cricket player in the city. The 18-year-old said the experience of leading his high school team gave him new motivation. “It changed my lifestyle a lot to have responsibility.”

Cricket has a long, but largely forgotten, history in the United States. American colonials played cricket before it fully caught on in England, and George Washington is said to have played the game with his troops during the Revolutionary War.

In the early 18th century, the British introduced cricket to their imperial colonies on the Indian subcontinent and in the West Indies, and the sport has had a strong following there ever since. But by the mid-19th century in the United States, baseball had eclipsed the popularity of cricket, which had no professional league and was seen as an elitist pastime of the leisure class.

Since 1965, the United States has had a national team that competes, with mixed success, against Commonwealth countries like India and Australia, where cricket is part of the national identity. But at the local level in New York, the sport enjoys a growing revival as transplants from South Asia and the Caribbean make their homes in the U.S.

Far from elitist, cricket in New York exists almost exclusively in the working-class neighborhoods of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island. John Adams High School is located in one such neighborhood. Nearly a third of the high school’s more than 3,000 students identify as ethnic Asians, and Ozone Park is sometimes known as “Little Guyana” for its thriving West Indian community.

At least seven youth and adult cricket leagues operate in the New York metropolitan area, and the Department of Parks and Recreation just opened a new cricket field at Canarsie Park in Brooklyn for a total of 14 within the city limits.

The inclusion of cricket in the public schools represents a major leap forward in the mainstreaming of the sport, according to John L. Aaron, Secretary of the USA Cricket Association.

“Cricket doesn’t enjoy the same benefits as other sports,” Aaron said, citing the lack of adequate cricket fields outside of New York. “That is changing and certainly PSAL has been a driving force in that process.”

The varsity cricket program in New York is the invention of Lorna Austin, a native of Barbados and a PSAL administrator. Austin pushed for a cricket league when she noticed South Asian students were not participating much in team sports like basketball, baseball and football.

The project stalled at first due to lack of funding but, when it finally launched in 2008, schools across New York City signed on. According to the PSAL’s assistant commissioner for cricket, Ricky Kissoon, several schools have petitioned for entrance to the league next year. Any public school is eligible to compete as long as enough students are interested in joining the team.

Kissoon emigrated from Guyana as a teenager 20 years ago and understands first-hand how sports can embody cultural identity. At the time of his arrival, cricket had relatively little presence in New York. He looked for opportunities to play cricket but had to settle for volleyball at Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx.

“If you notice, most of the players are from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Guyana,” Kissoon said. “Who knows if they would have played any sports in high school? It’s a cultural thing. Most kids—their parents or uncles played some form of cricket.”

The writer Joseph O’Neill explored this tradition in his novel Netherland, which features the Staten Island Cricket Club in post-9/11 New York. In a New York Times profile, O’Neill, who was born in Ireland and grew up in the Netherlands, called the game of cricket his “athletic mother tongue,” saying that to take up a new sport would be akin to learning a foreign language.

This connection between sport, country and family is true for Randy Nurse, batsman for John Adams High. The high school senior remembers playing cricket in an organized league in his village in Guyana from the age of 10. He moved to the United States two years later.

Nurse’s mother Shirley is herself an avid cricket fan, and she encouraged her son’s interest in the game. "I got all the cricket books, and Randy read them, since he was a very little boy in Guyana,” she said, seated in the bleachers at the final match of the season.

John Adams’ coach Alex Navarrete, originally from Uruguay, heads the swimming and soccer programs, but had no background in cricket before he was put in charge of the team. The league plays a faster-paced form of cricket called Twenty20, which can be completed in under four hours instead of five days, the length of a full test match.

But, even Twenty20 is a complex game, and the coach had much to learn in a world of overs, googlies and silly mid-offs. Navarrete said he taught the team about discipline and cooperation and the team taught him about cricket. “When I had a question,” Navarrete said, “they would tell me. They mentored me.”

They mentored well. John Adams’ Spartans were undefeated until the final match on June 14, at which Newcomers’ High School Lions of Long Island City won the championship, 111 to 105.

Coach Navarrete and John Adams’ principal Grace Zwillenberg were both quick to point out the role of sports in students’ overall performance in school. But cricket has a long way to go before it becomes a bridge to higher education, like basketball, football or even fencing.

Players of more mainstream sports are eligible for athletic scholarships and are courted by college programs. Cricket, however, is not represented in the NCAA, and only one college—Haverford in Pennsylvania— currently offers the sport at a varsity level. Most other college cricketers play in clubs like the ones Thakur Singh belonged to before PSAL opened its league.

Singh said he has no immediate plans to attend college. He said he’ll wait to make that decision with his parents. “That’s what makes me happy,” Singh said, “to bring pride to my family.”

$1.2M in Funds Raised to Restore Burial Ground from Colonial Era by John Lauinger - NY Daily News

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TUCKED ALONG the Long Island Rail Road tracks in downtown Jamaica is a ragged old cemetery where most of the graves have been virtually lost in an emerging woodland.

The thick and untamed foliage, a rarity in the concrete-centric downtown, conceals thousands of Colonial-era graves - and, perhaps, a few secrets.

Starting in September, the graveyard, known as Prospect Cemetery, will get a resurrection of sorts.

After years of planning, the Greater Jamaica Development Corp., acting as a steward for the city-owned property, has succeeded in raising $1.2 million in city, state and private funds for the restoration.

"It's a dream come true," said Cate Ludlam, president of the Prospect Cemetery Association.

Ludlam, 62, of Long Island, is a descendant of the Ludlam family, founders of a portion of the graveyard, believed to be one of the city's oldest cemeteries.

It was built in stages, with the earliest known written reference dating to 1668, Ludlam said. It is the final resting place of dozens of Revolutionary War and Civil War veterans, as well as Egbert Benson, New York's first attorney general.

The restoration, which includes funding secured by Borough President Helen Marshall, will preserve the cemetery's wooded character, but give it a face-lift.

"There is something very magical that emerged here, but we have to make that accessible to people," said Susannah Drake, a landscape architect whose Brooklyn-based firm, dlandstudio, was selected for the project.

The first phase of the project restored the cemetery's chapel. It reopened last year.

Peter Engelbrecht, an executive with the Greater Jamaica Development Corp., said the upcoming revamp will require what amounts to headstone triage.

"We probably have to save the ones right now that are in the most danger," he said, noting that students from Columbia University will inventory the graves using Global Positioning System technology.

The restoration may also unravel two historical mysteries.

The first involves a plateau hidden in the wooded section of the property that may be a Native American burial ground, Ludlam said.

The second comes from a history of the cemetery, written years ago, that notes headstones were once laid on the ground as a pathway. Ludlam said she is eager to find those mistreated headstones, if they exist.

"I have never seen those stones, and I have been here for 20 years, picking weeds," she said.

On Again, Off Again by Elizabeth Benjamin - The Daily Politics - NY Daily News

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Two City Council candidates who have been struggling to remain on the ballot as next week's special elections loom have been bounced out of the running yet again.

Senator-turned-full-time-attorney Marty Connor, who is representing 32nd CD candidate Geraldine Chapey, called in to say an appellate court (second department) chucked Glenn DiResto back off the ballot - just three days after he was put back on by a state Supreme Court justice.

At issue was the fact that DiResto chose the name "Families First" for his ballot line in the nonpartisan Feb. 24 election. Connor argued this ran afoul of election law, which forbids the use of names of already existing parties (in this case, the Working Families Party).

The Board of Elections sided with Connor, the Supreme Court overturned that decision, and now the Appellate Division has said the Board of Elections was right all along. Dara Miles, a freelance writer and Columbia J-School student, caught up with DiResto, who said:

"Elections should be determined in the voting booth, not the courtroom. It's the people's choice. It's unfair that another candidate feels they can take democracy in their own hands. Isn't that tyranny?"

Meanwhile, over in Staten Island's 49th CD, the Advance is reporting a state Supreme Court justice accepted a special referee's finding that embattled candidate John Tabacco fell far short of meeting the 1,367-signature requirement to make it onto the ballot.

Tabacco has had the same on again, off again problem as DiResto due to his selection of a symbol (a star) that was too much like that of an existing party (Democrat) to represent his made-up ballot line.

He was given time to cure that problem by the Board of Elections - a point noted by DiResto's attorney - but then didn't make the signature cut.

Close Senatorial Races Go to Democrats in N.Y. State by By Christine Choi - Columbia Spectator

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Two years after a failed attempt to capture a majority in the New York State Senate, Democrats made strong efforts Tuesday, culminating in their success in regaining control over the bicameral legislature.

The 2006 elections proved disappointing for Democrats when Republicans were able to defend their majority in Albany, losing only one seat to a Democratic contender and maintaining a three-seat majority in the 62-seat house. As Democrats dominate the Senate for the first time in 43 years, they also take charge of both the bicameral assembly and the governor’s office for the first time since the Depression era.

In shooting for the Senate, Democrats pitted the party’s nominees against long-standing Republican incumbents.

Caesar Trunzo, the state senator for 36 years from Long Island’s third district, was unseated by Brookhaven Supervisor Brian Foley, according to the New York Daily News.

In the 11th district of Queens, City Councilmember James Gennaro (D-Queens) faced off against Republican Frank Padavan, who has also been in the seat for 18 terms. While Padavan’s position was previously thought to be relatively secure, he and Gennaro were locked in a close race as of Tuesday night. Padavan proved victorious, according to the Daily News .

Meanwhile, the race in the 15th district of Queens placed Republican Senator Serphin Maltese, in his seat for 20 years, against City Councilmember, Joseph Addabbo (D-Ozone Park and Woodhaven). Tuesday night, Senator Maltese conceded defeat to Addabbo, according to the New York Times .

State Senator Bill Perkins (D-Harlem) was confident about the Democrats’ chances at his Take Back the State Senate Election Night Party in the Harlem State Office Building Tuesday night. Perkins ran uncontested this year.

“I’m feeling great about this,” he said, likening the victories for the Democrats in Albany and the national elections to the end of a long marathon.

More than winning, though, he was eager Tuesday night to express just what a Democratic majority might have in store for Albany.

“We’re also looking forward to much greater efficiency,” he said, “[and] much greater productivity.”

“There will be a strong focus on recognizing the economic challenges, and reconciling the divisiveness we’ve seen.” Perkins said. “This divide between upstate-downstate will be erased.”

A Democratic majority in Albany would shift power from the upstate and Long Island suburbs to the boroughs of Manhattan, according to the New York Times , with the possibility of all the state and assembly leaders coming from New York City’s five boroughs.

news@columbiaspectator.com

'Achievement Gap' in City Schools Is Scrutinized by Elizabeth Green - The New York Sun

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Scores of both black and Hispanic students on some state and national tests have gone up since Mayor Bloomberg took over the Department of Education in 2002, and by some measures the "proficiency gap" between black and Hispanic students and white and Asian ones has begun to close.

But by one other measure — not the test scores of black and Hispanic students alone or the percentage of them that met the bar called "proficiency," but a more subtle and relative measure known as the "achievement gap" — progress has been more elusive.

RELATED: Aaron Pallas's Achievement Gap Analysis | Department of Education Achievement Gap Analysis.

Three researchers studied that measure at the request of The New York Sun by analyzing detailed data the city Department of Education previously had not released. They found that the actual gap between different racial groups' test scores has not budged by most measures, and in some cases it has widened.

In the most encouraging case — the difference between black and white students' scores on an eighth-grade English test -- the gap has narrowed slightly. Yet it remains wide. In 2008, 74% of black eighth-graders in the city scored below the average white eighth-grader on the state English test, compared to 79% in 2002.

How much this achievement gap matters depends upon whom you talk to.

In an interview at Tweed Courthouse, the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, said the achievement gap is "an issue," but he said it should not obscure the significant gains black and Hispanic students have made under his watch.

Though in some cases the achievement gap is steady because no students have made gains on standardized tests, in other cases it is staying constant because scores have risen for all students — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian.

"If the way to close the achievement gap is to pull whites down, that's not a strategy that any intelligent person or any responsible school district would ever follow," Mr. Klein said.

Others say the relative differences between races the achievement gap exposes are important.

"In the real world, no one looks at proficiency scores to determine the likelihood of someone getting ahead," one of the researchers that analyzed the data for the Sun, Aaron Pallas, a professor of education and sociology at Columbia University's Teachers College, said. "What really matters is how people do in relation to one another. And so if you have groups remaining the same distance apart, then the group ahead is still going to remain ahead when you look at selection into colleges and the labor market."

Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have previously said that New York City's achievement gap is narrowing.

"Over the past six years, we've done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have," Mr. Bloomberg said in testimony to Congress this summer. "In some cases, we've reduced it by half."

Their statements draw on two measures of progress. The first is actual improvements made by black and Hispanic students on standardized tests.

At some grade levels, more black and Hispanic students are passing both federal and state tests than ever before.

The percentage of black fourth-graders scoring above the "basic" level on a federal math test soared to 72% in 2007 from 58% in 2003.

In other grade levels -- notably the eighth grade -- there has been little if any change in the number of black and Hispanic students attaining proficiency on both state and federal tests, and in some cases the number of black and Hispanic students passing tests has declined.

The second measure is the percentage of students in different racial groups that meet the bar known as "proficiency." The gap between the percentage of, say, black students and white students who pass that bar is what Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have been referring to as the achievement gap.

That measure has indeed been sliced in half in some cases. For instance, in 2002 the black-white gap on a state fourth-grade math test was 35 percentage points, with 76% of white students scoring "proficient" compared to 41% of black fourth-graders. By 2008, the gap had narrowed to 18 points: 91% of white students now score proficient compared to 73% of black students.

The proficiency gap is closing even as the achievement gap stays essentially the same because each gap represents a different kind of improvement. Proficiency rates detect movements across the proficiency bar, rising when students who had been below it learn enough knowledge and skills to reach the standard, but registering no change if students who were already meeting the standard surge even further above it. The achievement gap, on the other hand, is sensitive to changes both above and below the proficiency bar.

Black and Hispanic students are more likely to start out with scores below the "proficient" mark. That means that the proficiency gap can close even though all groups of students might be rising by equal amounts.

One of the three researchers who analyzed the achievement gap data for the Sun, Howard Everson, said that he puts more stock in proficiency scores, which are also the measure the federal government's No Child Left Behind law uses to judge schools and school districts.

Mr. Everson, a psychometrician at Fordham University, is the lead testing adviser to the New York State Education Department and an adviser to the federal government on its testing regime.

He said the proficiency figures are important because they contain not only information about test scores but also a professional judgment on whether a student has adequate skills and knowledge. Expert math and English teachers set "proficiency" bars, and Mr. Everson said he takes their judgments seriously.

On those grounds he said, "I think overall it looks to be pretty good news."

The third researcher who analyzed the data for the Sun, Robert Tobias, a New York University professor who was the city's testing director for 13 years, said he puts more stock in the achievement gap than in the proficiency gap because it reflects changes in students across the spectrum -- not just those who moved above or below the proficiency bar.

Mr. Tobias said the achievement gap's changes contradict claims the Bloomberg administration has made of impressive progress, which he said he has read in press releases and newspaper articles. "When one looks at this presentation, the picture is a lot more modest," he said.

The three researchers found that the gap between black and white students' average scores on an English test has closed slightly, as has the gap on that test between Hispanics and whites, and that no gap has closed on a mathematics test. It also found that the gap between Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers has widened slightly since 2002.

In some cases the gap remains wide because black and Hispanic students are making no progress and neither are white and Asian students. In other cases, black and Hispanic students are gaining some ground -- but white and Asian students' scores are improving at roughly the same pace.

The Department of Education also conducted an analysis of the achievement gap, reproducing the same process the outside researchers conducted. Pointing to small changes in figures, the department's analysis concluded that the gap has closed across the board even by this measure. "We are closing the achievement gap," the analysis said.

The researchers challenged that conclusion.

"This is not strong evidence that the gap is closing," Mr. Everson said. "The only thing you can say is that they're relatively flat, that the gap is relatively stable."

The achievement gap can also be examined by looking at New York City students' scores on a federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is known as the nation's report card.

An analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the federal Education Department, concludes that no achievement gaps have narrowed at all in New York City between 2003 and 2007. The only gap that moved in any significant direction is the one between poor students and the rest of the population, which widened slightly, that analysis said.

The National Center for Education Statistics also concludes that upward trends in the reading scores of black and Hispanic fourth-graders lauded by Mr. Klein are not statistically significant.

Mr. Klein criticized the National Center on Education Statistics analysis.

"Those are just confidence levels. Nobody is saying this is a science," Mr. Klein said. He added: "If three points is flat, and four points is statistically significant, then what you're doing is, you're playing something of a game."

Mr. Klein said he stands by his positive stance on New York City's success at closing the achievement gap.

"My view is that our black kids in the fourth grade are outperforming all black kids in America," Mr. Klein said. "Our kids are ripping the leather off the ball of the other kids around the country."

Others drew a more discouraging conclusion.

Mr. Pallas said the results should lead people around the country to question whether they should reproduce the policies being enacted in New York City.

"We need to be aware that what we're doing right now to close the achievement gap may not be working," Mr. Pallas said. "If what we're doing isn't working, we need to be aware of that and perhaps think about doing something else."

Lawrence Feinberg, the assistant director for reporting and analysis at the National Assessment Governing Board, the group that oversees the federal test, wrote in a memo last year that Mr. Klein's conclusions about progress by black students are "incomplete." The conclusions "may be questioned by his critics" because they depend on trends in test scores and do not take into account whether increases are statistically significant, the memo said.

The interim executive director of NAGB, Mary Crovo, to whom the memo was addressed, said in a telephone call to the Sun that the memo was an internal staff memo that was not meant to reflect the official position of the governing board. Asked whether she supported the memo's argument, she said, "I think the data in the memo are accurate, and that's as much as we can say."

A spokesman for the city's education department, David Cantor, called the memo "a politicized gloss" and said the outgoing executive director of NAGB, Charles Smith, had called Mr. Klein to apologize.