Education in Urban America.

There was good news, bad news, and troubling nonsense associated with the December 17, 2003, release of scores for ten big cities in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

The good news is that major urban school systems are willingly participating in NAEP, allowing their results to be held up for public inspection, and submitting to comparisons that can be harsh as well as revealing.

The bad news is that most students in these cities' systems performed dismally. In fourth-grade math, in only three of the ten jurisdictions did the percentage of kids scoring in NAEP's "proficient" range rise above the teens--and in just one did it beat the national average. In eighth-grade reading, at least two-fifths of the students were "below basic" in seven cities. In the six lowest-scoring cities, the percentages of reading-proficient eighth graders were grim: Chicago 15 percent, Houston 14 percent, Atlanta 11 percent, Los Angeles 11 percent, District of Columbia 10 percent, Cleveland 10 percent.

This shows that Washington's ambitious goal of getting every young American to the "proficient" level is akin to crossing the Grand Canyon, calling for heroic action on many fronts. Why, then, is the chairman of NAEP's governing board saying something different? An architect of the vaunted Texas education reforms, Darvin M. Winick is known for his reformist zeal. But not this time.

First he asserted that "the perception that students in urban schools do less well than others and have poor academic performance is not supported by the 2003 NAEP results." This is simply wrong. Their academic performance, by and large, is ...