New state test results released Wednesday by the New York City Department of Education offer a complicated picture of the pandemic’s effects on academic performance in America’s largest school district, showing students’ math performance tumbled but their English skills ticked upward from pre-pandemic levels. 

Just over a third of students in grades 3 through 8 — 37.9% — were proficient in math, released after COVID forced schools nationwide into remote learning and disrupted state assessments. That’s a 7.6 percentage point decline from 2019, suggesting deleterious effects of a pandemic that upended in-person learning.  

But it’s complicated. Nearly half of students — 49% — scored proficient in English language arts, 1.6 percentage points higher than in 2019. The results, which city officials at the state’s request, offer the first comprehensive look at student performance during the pandemic. The state canceled the test in 2020 and made it optional in 2021. Roughly 10% of city students opted out of either the reading or math exams this year, considerably higher than the 4% who sat out in 2019, .

“While results are complicated by the pandemic, the results reflect hard work by our students, families and educators during a difficult time,” DOE First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said, according to “They also reflect opportunity gaps and outcomes in particular for Black and Hispanic students, as well as students with disabilities and English-language learners that are unacceptable.” 

Tests administered outside New York City suggest, perhaps unsurprisingly, the public health emergency had a major negative impact on student learning. Earlier this month, results for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “nation’s report card,” found two decades of national growth in reading and math were wiped out by just two years of pandemic-induced disruptions. Declines were particularly stark among struggling students, further widening the performance gap between high- and low-achievers. 

In Los Angeles, home to America’s second-largest school district, showed a significant drop in student achievement from pre-pandemic levels. Outcomes on the 2022 Smarter Balanced state assessment found just 28.47% of students were proficient in math and 41.67% met English standards. Among big city school districts, Los Angeles schools were among to in-person learning while New York City was among the first to push to reopen classrooms, even while a majority of its families well into the 2020-21 school year.

Looking forward, Weisberg said NYC schools are focused on transforming education so that every student graduates with “a pathway to a rewarding career, long-term economic security, and equipped to be a positive force for change in their community.”

Here are four key takeaways from the New York City test results: 

Woes in math were particularly profound for older students

Overall, just 37.9% of NYC students scored proficient in math, and students at all grade levels posted declines from pre-pandemic levels. But the downturn was particularly pronounced for students in middle school. Among third graders, 48.4% scored proficient, a 4.8 percentage point drop from 2019. Meanwhile, just 25% of eighth graders scored proficient in math, an 11 percentage point drop from pre-pandemic levels. 

Younger students struggled with reading during the pandemic

NYC students posted gains in English language arts since 2019, and nearly half received a proficient score. But the results are more complicated when disaggregated by grade level. Younger students — particularly those in third and fourth grade — struggled while those in middle school outperformed pre-pandemic levels. 

With a 6 percentage point decline from 2019, 43.6% of fourth graders scored proficient in English this year. That’s compared to 52.6 percent of seventh graders who scored proficient this year, up 9.9 percentage points from 2019. 

Isabella Rieke, communications manager for Advocates for Children of New York, said the results underscored the urgency behind New York City moving  .

“While the overall ELA proficiency rate ticked upward, relative to 2019, the percentage of third graders scoring proficient fell by four percentage points and the rate for fourth graders fell by six percentage points,” she said in a statement. “These students would have been in first and second grades in March 2020—grades when children are mastering the relationships between sounds and letters and building the foundational literacy skills that will shape their future academic trajectory.”

Declines were particularly stark for Black and Hispanic students

As has been the case for years, the latest test results showed significant disparities in New York City between white and Asian American students and their Black and Hispanic peers. 

Among white students, 58.5% of students in third through eighth grade were proficient in math this year and 67.3% were proficient in English language arts. That’s an 8.2 percentage point decrease and a 0.7 percentage point increase, respectively. 

Meanwhile, 20.6% of Black students scored proficient this year in math and 35.8% were proficient in English. Among Hispanic students, 23.3% were proficient in math and 36.8% were proficient in English. Hispanic students fared the worst during the pandemic, posting a 9.9 percentage point drop in math proficiency compared to 2019.

English learners and students with disabilities may have weathered the pandemic better than the general student population

While English language learners and those in special education had poorer performance than students overall in both math and English, test results suggest they weathered the pandemic better. Compared with 2019, English language learners saw a 3.9 percentage point drop in math while those who have never received the English language learner designation saw a 7.6 percentage point dip. 

Similarly, English learners saw a 3.4 percentage point increase in their English proficiency since 2019 compared to a 1.1 percentage point increase for the general population. 

Students with disabilities posted a 3.1 percentage point decline in math proficiency and a 2.2 percentage point increase in English. Meanwhile, students without disabilities saw an 8.9 percentage point drop in math proficiency and a 1.4 percentage point gain in English. 

For some, the counterintuitive results raised red flags: 

Embattled education technology vendor Illuminate Education has become the first-ever company to get booted from the Student Privacy Pledge, an unprecedented move that follows a massive data breach affecting millions of students and allegations the company misrepresented its security safeguards. 

The Future of Privacy Forum, which created the self-regulatory effort nearly a decade ago to promote ethical student data practices by education technology companies, announced on Monday it had stripped Illuminate of its pledge signatory designation and referred the company to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general in New York and California, where the biggest breaches occurred, to “consider further appropriate action,” including sanctions. 

“Publicly available information appears to confirm that Illuminate Education did not encrypt all student information while” it was being stored or transferred from one system to another, forum CEO Jules Polonetsky said in a statement. He said the decision to de-list Illuminate came after a review including “direct outreach” to the company, which “would not state” that such privacy practices had been in place.

 “Such a failure to encrypt would violate several pledge provisions,” Polonetsky said, including a commitment to “maintain a comprehensive security program” to protect students’ sensitive information and to “comply with applicable laws,” including an “explicit data encryption requirement” in New York.

Encryption is the cybersecurity practice of scrambling readable data into an unusable format to prevent bad actors from understanding it without a key. Amazon Web Services to store student data on accounts that were easy to identify. 

Through the voluntary pledge, have agreed to to protect students’ online privacy. Though the privacy forum maintains that the pledge is legally binding and can be enforced by federal and state regulators, the move against Illuminate marks a dramatic shift in enforcement. The extent of the Illuminate breach remains unclear, encompasses districts in six states affecting an . 

Illuminate Education spokesperson Jane Snyder said the company is disappointed in the privacy forum’s decision, but it “will not detract from our commitment to safeguard the privacy of all student data in our care.” The privately held company founded in 2009 claims some 5,000 schools serving 17 million students use its tools.

“We will continue to monitor and enhance the security of our systems, and we will continue to work with students and school districts to resolve any concerns related to this matter while prioritizing the privacy and protection of the data we maintain,” Snyder said in a statement.

In a recent article in ����Ӱ��, student privacy experts criticized the Big Tech-funded privacy forum for failing to sanction companies that break the agreement terms. 

The action taken against Illuminate comes just three months after the Federal Trade Commission announced efforts to ramp up enforcement of federal student privacy protections, including against companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that lack reasonable systems “to maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of children’s personal information.” 

The privacy forum maintains that the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general can hold companies accountable to their pledge commitments via consumer protection rules that prohibit unfair and deceptive business practices, but such action has never been taken. Education companies have long used the pledge as a marketing tool and the privacy forum has touted it as an assurance to schools as they shop for new technology. 

Signs of a data breach at California-based Illuminate first emerged in January when several of its popular digital tools, including programs used in New York City to track students’ grades and attendance, went dark. City officials announced in March that the personal data of some 820,000 current and former students had been compromised. Outside New York City, home to America’s largest school district, state officials said the breach affected an additional 174,000 students across the state. Student information in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school district, was also breached. 

Compromised data includes information about students’ eligibility for special education services and free or reduced-price lunch, their names, demographic information, immigration status and disciplinary records. 

New York City officials have accused Illuminate of misrepresenting its security safeguards and instructed educators to stop using its tools. New York State Education Department officials are investigating whether the company’s security practices run afoul of state law, which requires education vendors to maintain “reasonable” data security safeguards and to notify schools about data breaches “in the most expedient way possible and without unreasonable delay.” 

School districts in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oklahoma and Washington have since that their personal information was compromised in the breach. Illuminate Education has never said how many people were affected by the lapse while at the that it has “no evidence that any information was subject to actual or attempted misuse.” 

“FPF believes that the privacy and security of students’ information is essential,” Polonetsky said in the statement, declining to comment further. “To help ed tech companies better protect student data, we will be providing training for Pledge signatories, with a specific focus on data governance and security.”

For years, critics have accused the pledge of providing educators and parents with a false affirmation about the safety of education technology while being a tech-funded effort to thwart meaningful government regulation. 

The privacy forum’s decision to yank Illuminate doesn’t suggest stronger pledge enforcement going forward, said Doug Levin, the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange. Rather, he accused the privacy forum of acting more in response to media coverage than a desire to hold companies to their promises.

“The only time that the Future of Privacy Forum has considered de-listing an organization is when the practices of a company have come under the attention of national media,” he said, adding that the press is an insufficient tool to hold tech companies accountable. “I think this is a case where [the privacy forum] was looking at collateral reputational damage and damage to the pledge and they had to act to protect their own self-interests and the interests of other pledge members. I do not read it as a signal that enforcement of the pledge will be enhanced going forward.”

Meanwhile, Levin sees Illuminate’s unwillingness to discuss its security practices with the privacy forum as another reason to believe the company acted negligently.

Illuminate is “clearly in legal jeopardy and I think they are concerned about making statements that could be used in a legal context to hold them accountable,” Levin said.

Still, the privacy forum’s decision to remove Illuminate raises the stakes from its previous enforcement efforts, most notably against the College Board, a nonprofit that administers the widely used SAT college admissions exam. In 2018, the privacy forum placed the nonprofit’s after found it was selling student data to third parties. The College Board was reinstated as an active pledge signatory a year later. It remains , despite a 2020 investigation by Consumer Reports that uncovered it was sending student data to major digital advertising platforms.

While some have argued that the College Board should have been removed from the pledge, the privacy forum has previously resisted efforts to de-list signatories. When the group learns about complaints against pledge signatories, it typically works with companies to resolve issues and ensure compliance, according to . 

Removing companies from the pledge, the post argued “could result in fewer privacy protections for users, as a former signatory would not be bound by the Pledge’s promises for future activities.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to the Future of Privacy Forum and ����Ӱ��.