NEW YORK CITY—Students in the Big Apple aren’t doing well in school, regularly failing to meet the national and state averages. However, the city isn’t doing so badly compared to other large cities.
The results show that fourth and eighth graders in New York City schools are doing worse than the national average but slightly better than average for a large city.
For example, 23 percent of eighth grade students in New York City are proficient in math, compared to the national average of 27 percent. Twenty-three percent is also the average proficiency for large city students, comparable to Denver and Boston.
Twenty-nine percent of eighth graders in New York City are proficient in reading. This is on par with the national average, but ahead of the big city average of 26 percent.
Fourth graders are in a similar situation. Proficiency in reading and mathematics isn’t up to the national average but is above the large city average. The biggest gap is in mathematics, in which the city has a 33 percent proficiency rate compared to the 39 percent average.
Proficiency dropped across the board during the COVID-19 pandemic; fourth graders suffered particularly, with their math proficiency dropping from 32 percent to 23 percent between 2019 and 2022.
The loss in proficiency has been mostly remedied. The fourth grade math proficiency recovered from 23 percent to 33 percent, slightly higher than before the pandemic. This is not so for eighth grade math proficiency, which has been in decline since 2017, slowly decreasing from 28 percent to the current 23 percent.
Some differences between students of different racial backgrounds were revealed. Only 16 percent of black and Hispanic fourth grade students were proficient in math, in contrast to 53 percent of white students and 58 percent of Asian students. Blacks and Hispanics make up about 62 percent of the student population in the 2022–23 school year.
On mathematics tests out of 500, black and Hispanic students scored 27–31 points lower on average than white students. The gap for the reading test is larger, at a 31–38 average point difference.
New York is the highest spender per pupil of any state. The New York City 2024–25 school year had a budget of $40 billion, with each K–12 student receiving the equivalent of $32,284 in education. The national average for spending per K–12 student in 2022 was $15,633. The second-highest average spender per student, Vermont, was paying $26,970 in 2022.
