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Ten years ago, almost to the day, we lamented the difficulty in comparing results on state tests from year-to-year because New York's Education Department changed testing and assessment guidelines more often than most people change their socks.
We noted, at the time, that proficiency rates in English language arts was 37.9% and 38.1% in math, truly depressing when one considered that meant only a little more than one-third of students were performing at an acceptable grade level. The state recommended at the time not to try to compare 2016 data to prior years, which would have been helpful to determine if the poor results were a one-year blip or a trend.
"Having some basis for a true comparison would be particularly helpful when reviewing scores like those released a
couple of weeks ago by the state Education Department, because limiting an analysis to one year of data is depressing," we noted.
We were reminded of those words this year when looking at the state’s 2026 test results. While local school districts’ results won’t be released publicly until November, the state said 48% of third through eighth graders were proficient in ELA and 57% were proficient in math. That sounds great – until you realize that things have changed so much we don’t know whether or not we’ve actually made progress or not over the past decade. It would be one thing if we could go back 10 years, but the state has tweaked and twaddled with things enough since then that true comparisons can only be made from 2023 to 2026, the three years the state has been using its Next Generation ELA and Mathematics Learning Standards.
The three-year data is a mixed bag from which it's hard to draw conclusions, particularly for ELA. Overall, ELA proficiency for all students was 46% in 2023-24, increased to 53% in 2024-25 and then decreased to 48% in 2025-26. The story is better for math proficiency, which increased from 52% in 2023-24 to 55% in 2024-25 and 57% in 2025-26.
Ironically, in that 2016 editorial, we used a bit of hyperbole to make the point that it was going to make serious gains in student proficiency.
"For math, it will take 12 years for the state to have half of its students proficient in math and a whopping 37 years until 75 percent of students are proficient -- and that is only if the paltry 1 percent gain seen in state students is actually a gain in proficiency and not a gain caused by simply changing the state's tests and the way the tests are administered," we wrote.
The state ended up getting to 50% proficiency faster than we thought – but because the state has made so many changes over the years, we have no idea if the state has made real gains or just gained the system with easier tests, different cut scores or a combination of both.
In our opinion, the state doesn't want the public to be able to draw a through-line from one decade to the next when it comes to student performance. The shifting sands of student proficiency mean the state's public disclosures of student performance may as well not happen, because unless you're part of the education establishment you have no idea what the state's statistics mean – and we think that's how the state wants it.