Their enrollment may be dropping, but their test scores are soaring.
The Archdiocese of New York’s 132 city elementary schools continue to outperform public schools by leaps and bounds in reading, and to a lesser extent in math, new statistics show.
Seventy-eight percent of Catholic-school eighth-graders aced the state reading exam — 21 percentage points higher than the public-school kids — and 82 percent passed the math test, 9 percentage points better than their public-school counterparts.
In fourth grade, 85 percent of Catholic-school kids met or surpassed state benchmarks in reading — 16 percentage points above the public schools — while 88 percent did so in math, 3 percent higher than the public-school youngsters.
“What’s starting to pay dividends for us is a culture of learning that we’re really trying to re-establish and re-emphasize in our schools,” said archdiocese Schools Superintendent Timothy McNiff.