Following up on Chad’s post, the Trial Urban District Assessment, or “TUDA” (which is not much of “trial” anymore, since it goes back to 2003) is really the single most interesting report going. State-level NAEP results are useful but they’re also yoked to overall state economic conditions and averaged through wide populations in such a way that it makes sharp distinctions difficult to draw. I’m not sure how much there is to learn from the average test score in a state as big and heterogeneous as New York, say, or from the fact that the average in Mississippi is much lower. By comparing cities, TUDA focuses on districts that, for all their differences, tend to share certain essential characteristics of urbanicity, governance, and significant levels of concentrated poverty. When the scores vary, it means something.

This year’s exam featured a bunch of new cities including Detroit and Baltimore. This provides a good opportunity to update the essential TUDA-based “demography is not destiny” chart. Here’s the percent of low-income 4th graders in each city who scored above “Basic” in math.

And here’s the percent who scored above “Proficient”

Clearly, poor children in some cities learn a lot more than poor children in other cities. On “Basic,” Boston and New York are 30 percentage points ahead of DC, with Atlanta and Cleveland not much better. The proportional difference for “Proficient” is even more pronounced. In fact, while you can’t see it on the chart, the percent of poor children in New York scoring at the exceptionally high “Advanced” level (four percent) is double the percent of Detroit students scoring at Proficient (two percent.) New York’s proficiency rate is eighteen times greater, at 36 percent. Again, this is for low-income students.

Which brings us to Detroit, as of now definitively the worst large school district in America. Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett bestowed that title on Chicago back in the ’80s, and DC has reined pretty much without challenge for the past two decades. Given the baroque levels of incompetence and corruption that until recently plagued students in the nation’s capital, it’s shocking to see that Detroit today is worse than DC has ever been. The Free Press ran an editorial on the subject titled, “If You Can Read This, You Can Help,” but it really should have said, “If You Can Read This, You Obviously Aren’t Enrolled in Detroit Public Schools,” that’s how bad these TUDA scores are. As Mike Casserly, executive director of the organization that represents urban schools systems, said, “Only a complete overhaul of the school system and how students are taught should be permitted at this point because the results signal a complete failure and breakdown of the grown-ups who have run this school system.”