Despite D.C. public school gains, system trails behind large-city average The study zeroes in on the performance of the city's traditional schools, excluding fast-growing charter schools. Chancellor Kaya Henderson said that while achievement gaps are not closing as quickly as anyone would like, the school system's overall gains are evidence that key policies - including efforts to raise academic standards and improve the quality of teaching - are working. "I am super-duper thrilled," Henderson said. While we're not at the big-city average, we are coming on strong, and if we're ever going to get to where we need to go, it's this kind of leapfrogging growth that is going to get us there. The school system's progress mirrors citywide results released last month, which showed significant gains - among the District's largest in the history of the national exams. Those results included D.C. charter schools, raising questions about how much the traditional school system - which has struggled to retain students in the fact of charter competition - contributed to the growth. The data released Wednesday, combined with additional data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, show that DCPS gains equaled or exceeded those of D.C. charter schools in each tested subject and grade level. The study released Wednesday is based on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, national math and reading tests that are administered every other year to a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country. The tests are the only continuing national assessment of student achievement. State-by-state results were released last month, but large cities have agreed to have their results published separately since 2002, with 21 participating this year in what is known as the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA). The tests are scored on a scale of 0 to 500 points. Overall, urban school systems averaged gains of between one and three points between 2011 and 2013, continuing a decade of steady if incremental growth. Achievement in large cities grew slightly faster than the country as a whole but continues to lag behind the national average. "While we still have a lot of work to do to close achievement gaps in our largest cities, this progress is encouraging," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement, singling out the District and two other cities - Los Angeles and Fresno - for notable progress since 2011. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that urban school systems" growth should not encourage the country's "testing fixation." Instead, the nation must address and confront urban poverty with programs such as universal pre-kindergarten, said Weingarten. She credited the District's public pre-K programs with contributing to "noteworthy" gains among the city's fourth-graders. The District's school system was the only city to make statistically significant gains in both subjects at both grade levels, posting gains of between five and eight points. Still, while Washington is no longer dead last among large cities, it is still in the bottom half, its scores tying or surpassing between four and nine of the 21 participating cities. The proportion of students who scored high enough to be considered proficient or advanced also trailed the big-city average. Among fourth-graders, one-fourth were proficient or above in reading and one-third were proficient or above in math. The gains mask enormous achievement gaps in the District between black and white students - gaps that are about double the national urban average and are larger than those in every other big city, including New York, Chicago and Miami. In fourth-grade reading, for example, black students averaged a score of 192 compared to white students" 260, a gap of 68 points - four points larger than in 2011 and more than double the average urban gap of 34 points. White students in the District, who tend to be affluent, also scored higher than the overall national average for white students (231) and higher than white students in any other large city. Seventy-eight percent scored high enough to be deemed proficient in reading, while only 13 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics met that mark. Gaps between poor children and their more affluent peers widened in 2013, although it's difficult to interpret that shift because the way poor children are identified has changed since 2011. The overall gains come amid demographic shift in the District that is beginning to trickle into the schools. The proportion of white fourth-graders has approximately tripled over the past decade, to 13 percent, while the proportion of black students has fallen from 87 to 67 percent over the same period. Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, an organization of urban school systems, said that demographics alone cannot account for the District's growth. Subgroup data and the council's analysis show that black students and Hispanic students made gains, he said. "Our takeaway is that all of the groups contributed to the growth, not just whites," he said. Henderson serves as a member of the executive committee that governs the Council of the Great City Schools. She said she too believes the school system's gains are not the product of demographic changes. "The gains are true gains," Henderson said. Henderson said she was proud of the school system's results compared to charter schools. Charter schools outperform the school system by significant, double-digit margins in eighth-grade math and reading. But the two sectors posted virtually the same scores in fourth-grade math and reading, with the school system besting charters by just one point in both subjects. The two sectors also made similar gains in every subject except eighth-grade reading: the school system gained eight points, while charters gained only two. Henderson, who has come under fire for failing to make the school system's struggling middle schools attractive to parents, said the eight-point gain is heartening. Are our middle schools where we want them to be? No," she said. But if they continue to grow at this pace, I think we won't have any trouble attracting families back to DCPS middle schools.