Opinion ID: 2254540
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Outputs

Text: School Completion. Concerning the first output, school completion, the proof revealed that of those New York City ninth graders who do not transfer to another school system, only 50% graduate in four years, and 30% do not graduate or receive a general equivalency degree (GED) by the age of 21, when they cease to be eligible for free public education. This rate of school completion compares unfavorably with both state and national figures, and the trial court considered it symptomatic of system breakdown (187 Misc 2d at 63). The Appellate Division concluded that there was no evidence quantifying how many drop-outs fail to obtain a sound basic education (295 AD2d at 15). That conclusion follows from the Appellate Division's premise that a sound basic education is imparted by eighth or ninth grade. A sound basic education, however, means a meaningful high school education. Under that standard, it may, as a practical matter, be presumed that a dropout has not received a sound basic education. In any event the evidence was unrebutted that dropouts typically are not prepared for productive citizenship, as the trial court concluded. [6] The Appellate Division would have required a precise quantitative division between those dropouts who somehow are adequately prepared and those who are not, but such a requirement is nowhere to be found in CFE. The State argues nonetheless that it is responsible only to provide the opportunity for a sound basic education and cannot be blamed if some studentsperhaps those who enter New York City schools after years of schooling in another countrydo not avail themselves of the opportunity it provides. As the trial court correctly observed, this opportunity must still be placed within reach of all students, including those who present with socioeconomic deficits (187 Misc 2d at 63). This observation follows from the constitutional mandate to provide schools wherein all children may be educated, and is consistent with the official position of the Regents and Education Department, as set forth in the 655 Report for 1999, that [a]ll children can learn given appropriate instructional, social, and health services. The evidence on why students drop out suggested mainly that the choice to drop out correlates with poor academic performance and, as noted in the 655 Report for 1999, racial minority status and concentrated poverty. The Report further indicated that dropout rates serve as useful measures of schools' abilities to    motivate learning, supporting the commonsense proposition that large dropout rates reflect problems with the schools as well as the students. The trial court properly considered both possibilities and declined to pin the blame solely on the deficits a troubled child brings to school ( see 187 Misc 2d at 63). There was certainly no proof that dropout rates are high because inordinate numbers of recent immigrants enter the ninth grade unable ever to graduate, though such students may take longer to graduate. [7] Moreover, as the trial court properly observed, education is cumulative, and the State's hypothesis that poor completion rates stem from the educational deficits of teenage immigrant students does not jibe with the significant evidence that New York City schoolchildren begin to accumulate learning deficits well before high school (187 Misc 2d at 63). Test Results. The State's main answer to the proof of graduation and dropout rates in City schools consists of evidence that, in any event, test results are not badand this is also where the Appellate Division concentrated its discussion of outputs (295 AD2d at 15-16). The State's reliance on some favorable standardized test results fails to take into account the full record on examination evidence. In particular, that evidence related to elementary school tests administered statewide and intended to present results with reference to the content appropriate to their grade level: the Pupil Evaluation Program (PEP), which measures individual achievement in reading and mathematics, and the Program Evaluation Test (PET), which measures performance in other subjects. As the trial court explained, the PEP measures student performance relative to a particular score, the state reference point (SRP) (187 Misc 2d at 65). The particular examination used for the PEP reading test during most of the 1990s was the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP). The DRP was replaced in 1998 because it was considered too elementary, in that over 90% of children outside New York City scored above the SRP, so that the exam was inadequate as a means of distinguishing fair from good and good from excellent students. As a means, however, of identifying students in need of remedial attention, the DRP was adequate: a score below the SRP signaled need for improvement. Between 1994 and 1998, the undisputed evidence showed that upwards of 30% of New York City sixth graders scored below the SRP in reading. Among third graders, 35 to 40% scored below the SRP, while in the rest of the state about 90% scored above. The evidence showed that at the third grade levelwhen children are expected to have learned to reada score at the SRP means a child is barely literate, and hence that over a third of City schoolchildren were functionally illiterate. PET scores in science and social studies showed New York City fourth, sixth and eighth graders invariably in the lowest quartile statewide, and generally between the 10th and 16th percentile. The trial court attached significance to these low PEP and PET scores (187 Misc 2d at 65-66). It also properly recognized thatas alwaysCity-wide averages reflect a process of aggregation wherein some successful schools and districts balance others where even larger numbers of pupils score below the SRP ( id. ). The Appellate Division set forth no basis to challenge the trial court's analysis of this output, other than its belief that courts should look at the nation as a whole, rather than to test result comparisons within New York State (295 AD2d at 16). We reject this exclusive focus on national comparisons because the record provides no information on how many students receive a sound basic education nationwide. The State does rely partly on tests administered statewide. In particular, it cites student performance on the Regents Competency Tests (RCTs), which have historically been administered to 11th graders as a prerequisite for graduation. In 1997-1998, 90% of the New York City schoolchildren who reached 11th grade demonstrated competency in reading and mathematics by passing either the RCTs or the more challenging Regents examinationsa figure not far behind the statewide and suburban averages. Although the RCTs are no longer used to measure readiness to graduate, this fact alone does not disqualify them as a measure of whether students have received a sound basic education. Nevertheless, as both parties agree, the RCTs assess achievement at only an eighth or ninth grade level in reading and a sixth-to-eighth grade level in math. Thus, while passing the RCTs may show that students have received a sound basic education as defined by the Appellate Division, it does not prove that they have received a meaningful high school education, as the trial court concluded (187 Misc 2d at 61). Additionally, according to the 655 Report for 1999, City students who took the RCTs in 1997-1998 actually passed at a much lower rate than 90%; 51% passed in math and 72% in English. The Report explains that City schools had adopted a new policy of administering the examinations to ninth rather than 11th graders, and this may account for some of the difference. Since the exams are a diagnostic tool for measuring skills taught in middle school, these results, at most, cast doubt on the results middle schools accomplish, rather than proving that students have received a meaningful high school education. Further, the 1997-1998 11th grade class with the 90% qualification rates consisted of only about 40,000 students, compared to a ninth grade enrollment of over 90,000. Thus the state's RCT passage ratesaside from proving nothing about high school achievementwould surely be lower, but for the alarming number of students who fall behind or drop out and so do not take the exam. This fact illustrates the need to be cautious in relying on test results, a point we made in CFE even as we recognized that such results have some value (86 NY2d at 317). The trial court properly exercised such caution in its discussion of test results, noting that the failure of many students to be promoted diminishes the value of evidence that students test at grade level (187 Misc 2d at 67). Apart from the RCTs, the State relies on results from an assortment of commercially-available nationally-normed reading and math tests administered to children in City elementary schools, notably the CTB-Reading (CTB-R) and California Achievement Test (CAT). As the State points out, just under half of all City schoolchildren score at or above the 50th percentile in reading, and a larger number do so in math. Plaintiffs counter that these exams are norm-referenced they present information only on how students perform relative to other studentsin contrast to criterion-referenced exams, which are informative about how students master content they are expected to know at a given level. Further, plaintiffs argue that national comparisons are irrelevant to the issue of whether New York City public school students have received a sound basic education. The Appellate Division rejected this argument (295 AD2d at 16). As we have already suggested, the New York Constitution ensures students not an education that approaches the national normwhatever that may bebut a sound basic education. Moreover, CFE makes clear that the measure of a sound basic education is educational contentthe set of basic literacy, calculating, and verbal skills children acquire and its fit with the goal of productive citizenship (86 NY2d at 316). Of course, results on a national norm-referenced exam may be translatable into a measure of the skills students must master to have a sound basic education, and we have no cause to doubt that the CTB-R and CAT are designed, as the State argues, to measure mastery of curricula considered important in New York as well as nationally. But during the years reflected in the record, the scores of City schoolchildren on these exams were reportedas the State admitswith reference to a norm rather than to achievement levels. The State has not shown how to translate these results into proof that the schools are delivering a sound basic education, properly defined. Thus, while we cannot say that the CTB-R and CAT exam results have no place in the mix of information on outputs, on this record the Appellate Division erred in according primacy to these results. In sum, the Appellate Division improperly relied on the RCTs in that they measure a level of proficiency far below a sound basic education, and, as to exams administered to younger children, it erred in relying on national norm-referenced exam results without evidence tying these results to the constitutional standard. We conclude that the trial court's assessment of exam results, like its assessment of completion rates, better comports with the weight of the credible evidence, and supports its conclusion that, whether measured by the outputs or the inputs, New York City schoolchildren are not receiving the constitutionally-mandated opportunity for a sound basic education.