School Daze: 56 Percent Of Queens’ Private/Parochial Pupils Flunk Reading Exams

Fourth-graders in Queens’ private and parochial schools outscored their public school counterparts, but they did not cover themselves with glory, according to test marks released last week by the New York State Dept. of Education (DOE).
Official state scores revealed that 56 percent of the fourth graders in 120 Queens private and parochial schools flunked their reading exams, as opposed to 61 percent of the local public schoolers. Only students in S.D. 25 and 26 averaged higher reading scores than their non-parochial school counterparts.
There were no consistent borough-wide scoring patterns. Positive scores ranged from a 90 percent passing rate in Holy Martyrs Armenian Day School in Bayside, to a disturbingly low 90 percent failure rate for the students of the Hebrew academy in Kew Garden Hills.
Zarmine Boghosian, principal of the Holy Martyrs School credited the school’s high reading scores to the strong educational foundation established by her faculty members. "We provide our students with a high quality education that meets the requirements of the N.Y.S. Dept. of Education, and then goes beyond," she said.
The report’s negative numbers gave little ammunition to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has called for a school voucher program which would allow parents to send their children to public or private schools with public funds.
"What it shows is there isn’t much difference in a school system that selects its students and a school system that doesn’t," said Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the City Board of Education. She said that both the City’s public and non-public schools system "didn’t do very well."
The "pass/fail" percentiles were also misleading. Some private/parochial schools gained a 90 percent passing rating, with nine of its ten students received a passing grade, while P.S. 188 in S.D. 26 achieved a similar score with over ten times more students. There were also striking similarities to high and low scores in the Queens public school system: Non-public schools in more affluent neighborhoods generally outscored private and parochial schools in poorer neighborhoods.
Last month, the state DOE reported that Queens public school students outscored students in the reset of New York City (49 percent vs. 33 percent). Despite this showing, thousands of Queens public school students have already begun summer school classes to upgrade their reading skills. No word on how many private/parochial school students were seeking classroom help this summer.
Further diminishing the gloss of the parochial/private schools’ higher reading scores was a sample comparison of their averages with public schoolers in the same educational district.
In School District 26, for example, the marks of 1,600 public school test takers (the City’s highest scoring district) were matched against the 450 parochial school students whose schools are in the same district. Figures released by the state DOE revealed that 75 percent of S.D. 26 students received passing reading grades, while only 53 percent of the youngsters from parochial school within that district showed reading proficiency.
The Citywide test was administered last January, to an estimated 23,000 Queens students: 3,500 students in 120 private and religious schools, and nearly 20,000 public school students in 159 local schools.
The students were graded on four levels:
Level 1 — (Fail) — Indicated illiteracy.
Level 2 — (Fail) — Classroom remediation required.
Level 3 — (Pass) — Meets required standards.
Level 4 — (Pass) — Exceeds standards.