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# Mapping NYC Common Core Scores

Contributed by David Letzler.

### Introduction: A Brief History and Description of the Common Core

In 2009 the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers resolved to develop a set of national education standards known as the Common Core. These were intended to unify what had been to that point a set of highly localized state education standards.  The hope of the Common Core was that a nationally-oriented education policy would provide uniform benchmarks to guide and evaluate the American educational system.  By 2013, most states had begun implementing the Common Core.  That year, New York State began using the Common Core as the basis of statewide English and math tests administered to all public school students in grades 3 through 8. The Common Core and its associated tests have since come under some criticism. Many parents and education professionals have complained that the Common Core has increased the focus on high-stakes testing and, subsequently, “teaching to the test.” Moreover, they believe that the uniform standards do not make sufficient allowance for students to learn at different paces and in different ways, and that the money spent on building the Common Core could have been  used to directly support schools.  That is an important debate, but it’s one for another essay. For now, those of us interested in public education in New York City have four years of data to examine regarding school performance on the tests.  To do so, I developed the  New York City Common Core Appto chart the performance of all NYC public schools on the math and English tests for grades 3-8 during the period 2013-2016.  In this post, I will examine the insights provided by this data.  In brief, the results of my analysis suggest the following: 1) the results show the clear effect of neighborhood income level, though that effect is far from all-encompassing; 2) there has been clear progress on the English tests over time, both from one grade cohort to the next and longitudinally throughout a cohort; and 3) progress on the math test has been more elusive, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

### Data Sources

To construct my app, I combined four data sources.  I downloaded NYC public school test scores from NYC Open Data.  I overlaid these results onto a map of NYC’s official 2010 census tracts, using a shapefile downloaded from the NYC Planning website.  I found income data on these tracts from the official US Census Burea’s American FactFinder website.  Last, I found the addresses of all public schools on the NYC Department of Education website, then acquired their geographic coordinates by querying Google Maps’ geocoding API.  I combined this material together in R and built the app in Shiny, primarily using the Leaflet package.  The relevant code and data are here.

### The City at a Glance

Let’s take a look at the city as a whole first.  Here is the city map, displaying test results on the math exam from 2016.  Each dot represents one school, with the green end of the color spectrum representing a higher percentage of students who scored at the “proficient” levels (i.e., scored at Level 3 or 4) and the red end representing lower percentages.

Those of you who know the city well will probably nod.  A map charting performance on the math test essentially doubles as a demographic map of the city.  There’s a strong concentration of red and orange in eastern Brooklyn, the south Bronx, and northern Manhattan.  These are largely low-income, heavily African-American and Latino neighborhoods.  Meanwhile, the green dots are concentrated in locations like mid- and downtown Manhattan and northeastern Queens,  predominantly upscale white and East Asian communities.  The yellow dots largely cover middle-class, white areas like central Queens, southern Brooklyn, and Staten Island.  The distinctions are a little less visible, but equally present, on the map for the English test: the deep red areas in Brooklyn and the Bronx become a little more orange, while northeastern Queens moves toward the yellow range, probably due to the communities of high-skilled Asian immigrants in that area.  Correlation between math and English scores against median household income is, respectively, r=0.47 and r=0.51 at vanishingly small p-values.

### Time Heals All Wounds and Wounds All Heels : Two Competing Trends

If we break down the data temporally, we can see two contrary stories emerges.  The positive one involves the year-by-year results.  If we look at the scores on the 2013 English exams, the map looks a good deal less friendly than the one from 2016.

In fact, only 27.6% of students scored as proficient in 2013, compared to 39.3% in 2016.  Over time, the scores have steadily improved.  We see a more muted version of that trend on the math exams, moving from 31.0% to 37.6%. The real-world causes behind those trends might derive from several sources.  One  might be that the Common Core has done what it was intended to do: slowly improve proficiency by holding students to uniform, high standards.  It may, however, be that students are simply getting better at adapting to the test or that, after complaints about vagueness on the ELA test questions in early years, the questions themselves have improved and students can more readily answer them.  For that matter, it may also be that the increasing trend of parents “opting out” of the tests on behalf of their children has caused weaker students to be disproportionately excluded from the test pool, which would artificially raise the scores without actually improving student proficiency.  Still, the fact that steadily more students are scoring at the proficient level is a positive sign. The negative trend, however, is that students appear to perform progressively worse in higher grades, especially in math.  If we take 2016, we see that math performance is relatively fine through the fourth grade, at over 40% system-wide.  As we move toward the middle grades, though, we see noticeable declines.  By the eighth grade, there are ugly red markers everywhere on the map, with many schools shepherding fewer than 10% of their students to proficiency.