Bob Somerby points me today to the lastest test scores for New York City students. Here’s an entirely gratuitous chart showing how they compared to the statewide average for 8th graders:
On average, city kids did better than the rest of the state. That’s not bad. Maybe New York City schools aren’t quite the cesspools we’ve been led to believe.
But there’s bad news too. Since 2013, the racial difference in test scores has widened in New York City. Among grades 3-8, the black-white gap has widened by 3.5 points in math and by 1 point in English. And that’s not the only gap that’s growing. Check this out:
The black-white gap has been around forever and it’s a national disgrace. But the male-female gap is nearly as big. I would be curious to see this for 8th graders only since this difference might start to wash out as boys catch up to girls in the maturity department, but although NYC provides grade-level information for lots of things, they don’t have it for this.
