That’s right: The lowest grade you can get in a NYC high school is a 55. Why? Because it would make it “extremely unlikely that a student can recover if the semester gets off to a difficult start.”

“It is common practice in high schools to establish 55 as the lowest grade awarded to students,” superintendent Juan Mendez wrote in an email to a teacher complaining about the policy. . . . education officials told The News that the practice is routine at other schools . . . “This is not an issue of grade inflation,” said schools spokeswoman Erin Hughes. “Schools do not typically use the full 0-100 scale for the reason that doing so makes it extremely unlikely that a student can recover if the semester gets off to a difficult start.”

Just another example of Bloomberg cooking the books at the Department of Education.

via NYC high schoolers can’t earn ‘0′ even if they skip class, miffed teachers say – NY Daily News.

The good news is that NYC students are doing a teensy bit better on the standardized tests:

The bad news is that the scores are still piss poor (only 35%-40% are proficient in math or reading).

The scary news is — hey!  They’re on par with the rest of the country.

The new results, released Thursday by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, found that 32 percent of New York public-school eighth-graders were proficient in math, up 2 percent over tests given in 2011. Only 35 percent were proficient in reading in 2013, the same as two years ago.

The good news is that fourth-graders are doing a bit better. Forty percent of them were rated proficient in math, up 4 percent over 2011, and 37 percent were proficient in reading, an ­increase of 2 percent.

The national numbers:

• Math — 35 percent for eighth-graders, 42 percent for fourth-graders.
• Reading — 36 percent for eighth-graders, 35 percent for fourth-graders.

60% of NY students not up to par | New York Post.