States are required by law to measure the academic progress of their students, but they use very different measurements and have an incentive to make their schools look good, so we can’t quite trust the results. For decades now, we’ve had national and state educational report cards that take a representative sample that allows us to draw conclusions about national trends and make state comparisons. In the last seven years we’ve started collecting similar data on the nation’s largest cities. Today was the release of the most recent results in mathematics, and there’s good and bad news. The good:

• Of the ten districts that have participated in mathematics since 2003, eight have made statistically significant gains in fourth-grade math. Nine have made statistically significant gains in eighth-grade math over the same period.
• Districts with the most riding on these results–New York, Chicago, and the District of Columbia–now have some important external validation. Each of these cities, led by distinctive and powerful superintendents, have touted their records in raising test scores on state exams. Those results have been questioned as illegitimate, because they have come on the easier, less valid state exams. Today’s findings should give them vindication: fourth- and eighth grade students in each of these cities have progressed faster than the nation as a whole in math since 2007 and since 2003.
• The District of Columbia*, in particular, has cause for a small celebration. Its fourth- and eighth-graders had previously been in last place, but steady progress since 2003 has moved it out of the cellar.

The bad:

• Cleveland is the only city that’s actually gone backwards. Fourth-grade students in 2009 scored lower than they did in either 2003 or 2007, and eighth-graders have slid since 2007.
• Scores of fourth-graders in Austin and Charlotte have remained stagnant.

The ugly:

• Detroit, in its first year of participation, set new lows. On a 500-point scale, both its fourth- and eighth-graders are 13 points behind the second place city. Sixty-nine percent of its fourth-graders and 77 percent of its eighth-graders scored at the below basic level.

*The D.C. results excluded charter schools.