NEW YORK, NY — EdTrust-New York welcomes the New York State Education Department’s (NYSED) release of preliminary 2025-26 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Grades 5 and 8 Science assessment results ahead of the new school year.
At the same time, we are deeply concerned by the significant decline in ELA outcomes and the dramatic shifts in student performance over the past two years. These results raise serious questions about the accuracy of last year’s statewide improvements in ELA, Math, and Science proficiency. In 2024-25, statewide proficiency rates appeared to show encouraging progress, with ELA proficiency increasing 7 percentage points to 53%, Math increasing 3 points to 55%, and Science increasing 9 points to 44%. This year’s preliminary results tell a different story: ELA proficiency dropped 5 points to 48%, while Math increased 2 points to 57%, and Science increased 3 points to 47%.
The sharp decline in ELA performance is especially concerning. NYSED never adequately investigated or explained last year’s dramatic gains, making this year’s reversal difficult to interpret. Do these dramatic statewide swings truly reflect real change in student performance, or do they indicate that the state’s ELA assessments are not measuring student performance consistently enough for families and the public to meaningfully compare results from year to year?
When statewide ELA performance fluctuates dramatically from one year to the next, the testing system, not the hard work of hundreds of thousands of students and thousands of educators, deserves closer scrutiny. EdTrust-New York calls on NYSED to commission an independent audit of the last three years of ELA testing, so the public can better understand the testing protocols, scaling and scoring methodology, and standard-setting processes behind these results.
The contrast between local reading screeners and statewide ELA results raises additional concerns. Districts such as New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) have reported much steadier year-over-year progress that aligns with trends seen in other states and districts implementing evidence-based literacy initiatives. In New York City, the percentage of K-5 students performing above the national reading benchmark increased from 39.1% in the 2023-24 school year to 41.6% in the 2024-2025 school year, a 2.5-point increase. That progress continued in 2025-26, reaching 43.4%, an additional 1.8-point increase. Although local screeners and state assessments measure different outcomes, local data reflect steady improvement year-over-year rather than the state’s dramatic rise and sharp decline. As NYC Reads continues to align classroom instruction with the science of reading, these local trends offer encouraging evidence of sustained progress.
Regardless of these dramatic year-to-year swings, statewide ELA assessments show proficiency hovering around the 50% mark, indicating that roughly half of New York students in Grades 3-8 are not reading proficiently. That reality demands urgent state action to ensure all students have access to evidence-based literacy instruction and screening, particularly given the uncertainty surrounding recent state assessment results. A recent EdTrust-New York study found that at least 21% of districts continue to use instructional materials that are not aligned with the science of reading despite a 2024 law requiring all districts to adopt evidence-based practices. New York also remains one of the last states without a comprehensive literacy framework aligned to the science of reading. Next year, EdTrust-New York and the New York Campaign for Early Literacy will lead efforts to pass the Right to Read bill (A.78/S.9847), which would significantly accelerate New York’s efforts to improve literacy outcomes.
Finally, EdTrust-New York urges NYSED to release disaggregated data for the preliminary assessment results. Without those data, educators, families and policy makers cannot understand how students from different ethnic/racial, socio-economic and other student subgroups are performing. NYSED should also resume its long-standing practices of presenting to the Board of Regents and the public with a comprehensive analysis of Grades 3-8 assessment results. Those reports examined statewide trends over time and disaggregated results by district types and student subgroups. The last report was presented at the September 2019 Board of Regents meeting. Since statewide testing resumed after the pandemic, NYSED has discontinued that level of public reporting. New York deserves more than topline proficiency rates, or the burden of combing through NYSED’s data dashboards to understand statewide trends and achievement gaps. Families, educators and policymakers deserve the same level of transparency and accountability that NYSED once routinely provided.
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About EdTrust-New York:
EdTrust-New York is dedicated to eliminating equity and opportunity gaps that hinder students from reaching their full potential. We focus on ensuring that all students, especially Black, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander students and those from low-income backgrounds achieve high levels of success from early childhood through college. For more information, visit EdTrustNY.org.