For Bloomberg, a Day to Celebrate Successful Schools Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott; and senior education officials took a victory lap of sorts on Monday, visiting 22 New York City public schools that ranked among the state's top 25 in reading and math exams given last spring. The performances on the new exams, which were some of the first nationwide to be aligned with a more rigorous set of standards known as the Common Core, offered Mr. Bloomberg a chance to boast about his education record as his 12-year run as mayor comes to a close. "Our administration's core philosophy, when it comes to education, has always been, if we raise our expectations, our kids will meet them," Mr. Bloomberg said at Talented and Gifted Young Scholars, a citywide gifted school in East Harlem that was one of the 22 high-scoring schools. The mayoral blitz, carried out with militaristic precision, came as the two men campaigning to lead the city in the post-Bloomberg era have been offering a stark contrast on educational issues. The Democratic nominee, Bill de Blasio favors undoing much of the Bloomberg administration's centerpiece educational policies by slowing the growth of charter schools and ending, for at least a year, the practice of closing low-performing schools. The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, has defended the mayor's record on education and wants to expand the number of charter schools. Mr. Walcott has warned in recent months that schools would be in peril if the next mayor reversed Mr. Bloomberg's policies. But Mr. Bloomberg has decided not to endorse anyone in the race and on Monday sidestepped any discussion about his successor. "All I know is what we've done," said Mr. Bloomberg, who listed some of the facts he deems creditworthy, including the achievement of students, the increasing desire of families to be a part of the school system and the city's ability to attract "the best and the brightest" teachers from around the country. Less than one-third of New York City's students passed the reading and math tests this year, as scores dropped in virtually every school in the state. On the whole, city students outperformed those in other large districts in the state, and the city's passing rate nearly matched the state's, even though the city has many students who are poor or not native English speakers. "We have been closing the gap with the state for a few years now, and that just has not happened, to the best of my knowledge, in any other state where there are a lot of big cities," Mr. Bloomberg said. But gaps in achievement between black and Hispanic students and their counterparts have continued to persist. And many of the 22 schools that the mayor showcased on Monday were in well-to-do neighborhoods or were highly selective in their admissions, including the Anderson School (No. 1 in the state); New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math, or NEST+m, (No. 4); the Brooklyn School of Inquiry (No. 18); and TAG Young Scholars (No. Officials, however, noted that seven of the schools on the list were opened after Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, including three that hew to the administration's goal of giving poor students more choice: the Active Learning Elementary School in Queens and two Success Academy charter schools in the Bronx. Batting away any criticism that most of the city's students could not score high enough to be considered proficient in English or math, he said: "Are we where we want to be? And incidentally, we'll never be where we want to be. This concept of proficiency is, I've always thought, so misleading. There's no Nobel Prize winner that I know that says, "I've stopped studying, stopped learning." " Correction: September 16, 2013 An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of the New York City schools chancellor. He is Dennis M. Walcott, not A.