Many children left behind

Bill de Blasio, who never fails to remind us that he’s New York’s first public-schoolparent mayor, boasts of transformation in the nation’s largest school district. Graduation rates rising! State test scores, increasing! More 4-year-olds in pre-K, an investment sure to pay big dividends!

The latest raft of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the U.S. government’s gold-standard exam, tells a different story.

From 2015 to 2017, city kids’ scores were flat in almost every category. The only meaningful shift: a seven-percentage-point drop in the proportion of fourth-graders rated proficient in math.

To be fair to the city, students are basically flatlining across New York State and around the country, troubling news for enthusiasts of the Common Core standards.

But New York City kids were below the average of the 27 big cities measured by the test. In Houston, last led by new city Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, scores slid across the board.

If schools keep doing more of the same, expect more of the same results.