On Board Online • August 31, 2026
By Sara Foss
Special Correspondent
Grade 3-8 math and science scores saw modest improvement during the 2025-26 school year while reading scores fell so dramatically after a prior-year gain that an education advocacy group is calling for an independent audit.
According to preliminary test results released in August by the State Education Department (SED):
- In math, 57% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient, up from 55% in 2024-25.
- In science, 47% were proficient, up from 44% the previous year.
- In English Language Arts, 48% of students were proficient, down from 53% in the prior year but up from 46% in 2023-24.
- Declines in ELA were most pronounced among fifth-graders, where there was a drop of 14 percentage points to a proficiency rate of 43%.
EdTrust-New York, a statewide education policy and advocacy organization, is calling for an independent audit of the last three years of state ELA assessments.
"SED never adequately investigated or explained last year's dramatic gains, making this year's reversal difficult to interpret," EdTrust said in a statement. "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?"
In any event, 50% proficiency in a statewide assessment of reading and literacy is not good enough, EdTrust said. "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."
In statement that accompanied the release of the results, SED spokesman JP O'Hare said the agency takes the decline in statewide ELA performance seriously and will conduct a "detailed analysis" to better understand where students are experiencing challenges, which student groups and communities have been most affected and where additional support and resources are needed.
"We will not minimize or attempt to explain away what the data tell us," O'Hare said. "When scores increase, we report that progress. When they decline, we report that as well. Our responsibility is not to create a narrative around the results, but to understand them, identify where students need additional support and act accordingly."
New York's test scores have become part of an ongoing national conversation about issues in measurement of academic achievement. Experts have observed that when students perform better on standardized tests, the gains tend to be incremental. They say that large swings in test results are highly unusual.
Emily Oster, a well-known economist whose research focuses on health and statistical methods, wrote about New York's state test results in an essay on Substack. "Data does not usually look like this," she wrote. "The huge gains in 2025 here are implausible, and they seem even more so with the decline in 2026." She added: "This data looks like someone made - and then fixed - a mistake."
To try to make sense of things, On Board interviewed professors at the University at Albany and the University at Buffalo with expertise in assessment. They emphasized that long-term trends are far more important than year-to-year fluctuations. At the same time, they both raised the possibility of a flaw in test design or some other form of inconsistency that contributed to the odd pattern in ELA scores.
"When we see large swings on tests, in positive or negative directions, we should be very cautious about interpreting those tests as the truth," said Ben Solomon, an associate professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University at Albany's School of Education. "Seven-point swings in either direction are very uncommon. At the state level, it's unheard of."
"When we look at assessment data that's administered on a large scale, we tend to see small gains from year to year, or small declines from year to year," said John Strong, associate professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo. "The framing of the reading scores as a big jump last year and then a big decline this year, that's certainly what we see in the data, but I think the State Education Department is going to be looking into the data more closely to explain it."
The up-and-down pattern in reading scores overlaps with a major shift in pedagogy in the state and nation. An approach that was favored for decades, often called balanced literacy, is now viewed as ineffective. New York State has been encouraging school districts to shift to an evidence-based literacy curriculum called the Science of Reading, and some states have passed legislation requiring the shift.
University professors say it's too soon to say whether new approaches are working, and that last year's big increase in ELA scores might have been an anomaly.
"When we're looking at curriculum change, you're very, very unlikely to see large increases (in test scores) from year to year," said Strong of the University at Buffalo. "We tend to see small increases in year one and then larger increases compounding over time." He noted that the state is seeing small, year-to-year increases in math scores, "which is a good thing."
A more fundamental concern is widespread agreement that far too many students struggle with reading and fail to achieve proficiency for their grade level.
With the exception of last year's surge in reading scores, "The data were pretty consistent," revealing that less than half of students are reading at grade level, Strong said. This requires "long-term attention to ensure that when kids go to school in New York, they're getting high-quality instruction, they're reading lots of text, they're developing to the greatest extent that they can."
Solomon of the University at Albany agreed. "Achievement in New York has been a pressing concern for a long time, especially with marginalized kids," he said.