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Mayor Bloomberg struck a boastful tone as he and Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced modest gains in city students’ test scores today.

Bloomberg focused on the improvement in city students’ scores relative to the test score gains across the state. He said the improvements were especially notable given changes to the state tests to make them tougher.

“The only way to measure how students are doing year in and year out is to compare them to how students are doing in the rest of the state,” Bloomberg said. “The good news is, no matter where the state sets the bar for proficiency, New York City students continue to achieve at higher levels each time.”

City students’ average test scores went up by 1.5 percentage points in reading and 3.3 points in math, more than scores statewide. But the city’s reading and math scores still lag about 10 points behind schools in the rest of the state, city officials acknowledged.

Nonetheless, Bloomberg said the small jumps in city students’ math and English scores amounted to an “enormous difference.”

To underscore the upward trajectory, Bloomberg even presented a graph of how students would have performed according to the standards that were in place before last year. The graph projected that under the old scoring system, which the state discarded last year as inflated, 86.7 percent of students would be considered proficient in math and 72.7 percent of students would be considered proficient in reading.

Howard Everson, a professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Education at CUNY and chair of the Technical Advisory Group, a committee that guides the state’s testing program, said that the gains under the new standards were small, they can be viewed as statistically significant because of the sheer number of students tested. He also said he trusted the state’s ability to track score trends even as the tests’ length, composition, and proficiency standards change.

But critics of the Bloomberg administration’s school policies cautioned against reading too much into the new scores. (more…)