By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Test scores plummeted at public elementary schools across the city this year, but an accountant who has been tracking test data for the past eight years advised parents not to worry.
Tom Goodkind, a Battery Park City parent and Community Board 1 member, pointed out that everyone’s scores dropped, so children likely will not be penalized for scoring lower than they had hoped.
Goodkind focused his analysis on the fourth-grade English Language Arts test, a key factor in middle school admissions, and sorted all 734 elementary schools in the city based on the percentage of students that passed the test this year.
Although just 45.6 percent of fourth graders passed the ELA this year, compared to 68.9 percent last year, according to the city, Goodkind found that the schools performed similarly to past years relative to each other.
“The big news for parents this year is that even though your child may have scored lower than expected, a side-by-side comparison with other New York City children [may show that the child is doing better] than this year’s…score indicates,” Goodkind said.
“Comparatively, the schools are in pretty much the same place as they were last year.”
At the top of Goodkind’s ranking is The Anderson School on the Upper West Side, where every single fourth-grader has passed the ELA test for the past five years. Despite the harder test, Anderson’s 55 fourth-graders maintained their perfect performance this year.
As in the past, most of the best-performing schools in Manhattan are for gifted children and require a test for admissions. Anderson, for example, only considers students with an entrance exam score in the 97th percentile or above.
In addition to Anderson, a gifted school that has consistently done well is NEST+m (New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math) on the Lower East Side.
Since Principal Olga Livanis took the helm five years ago, the selective K-12 school has consistently made the top 10 of Goodkind’s list. This year, NEST ranked third in the city, with 73 of the 74 fourth-graders passing the ELA test.
Livanis was pleased with the results, and she said the students’ success is about more than direct test preparation.
“We do not teach to the test,” Livanis said. “We have an eclectic program that works very well. Students do a lot of writing, and we start very early with vocabulary.”
Livanis agreed with Goodkind that the fourth-grade ELA is important, because it helps determine where children go to middle school.
Thirteen Manhattan schools had less than 20 percent of their fourth-graders pass the ELA test this year, Goodkind reported. Those schools were on the Lower East Side, the East Village, Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood.
Goodkind said if those families who live in lower-performing school districts cannot move, they may want to apply to gifted and talented programs.
“It’s very important for a child to score [relatively] well on the fourth-grade ELA test,” Goodkind said. “That gets them into a decent middle school, which gets them into a decent high school, which gets them into a decent college.”
