“We’re about where we were 10 years ago,’’ Margaret Blood, president of Strategies for Children, an advocacy group for early education, said of third-grade reading scores, a key indicator of how students will progress through their school years.
Some education officials say that programs established in recent years have not had time to yield solid results, and that some inner city schools across the state have shown striking gains.
Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education said certain schools have made great strides, and figures show that some segments of the low-income student population have dramatically improved scores. The percentage of 10th graders who were proficient at English, for instance, rose from 48 in 2007 to 69 this year. In math, the figure climbed from 47 percent to 56 percent.
“We still have a gap in achievement, but we’ve seen steady improvement,’’ Chester said. Scores among low-income students are “much stronger today than five or 10 years ago,’’ he said.
“The evidence is there,’’ he said. “Low-performance is not preordained.’’
But in most cases, even where improvements were noted, the gaps persisted. In seventh-grade math, just 29 percent of students from low-income families scored proficient or higher on the standardized test, compared with 51 percent of all students. In third-grade English, 40 percent of low-income students were proficient, compared with 61 percent of all students.
When scores of low-income students are compared with those of wealthier students, the gap widens even more.
A Globe review found that schools with substantial numbers of low-income students are consistently failing to meet academic benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind law, with more than 60 percent falling short of standards in English, and math, and lagging well behind schools with wealthier students.
