Math 4’s  more complicated pattern of inequality is borne out in both 8th grade measures.  For 8th grade English and math, like the other indicators, LI schools outperform NYS schools, with steady improvements in raw scores through the time period, except for English 8 which saw a slight decrease in raw scores in 2010.  Again, the passing rates at the Island- and State-levels mirror the raw score trends through 2009.  With 2010’s harder cut scores, passing rates for  English and especially math drop substantially in that year.

Moving to the disaggregation of LI schools by poverty, the biggest performance gap in raw scores for 8th grade English is in 2006, when the low poverty schools averaged 41 points better than high poverty schools.  Through the years, that gap closed to 29 points, and then expanded slightly to 30 raw points in 2010.  Despite that the English 8 raw score gap was near its smallest in 2010, in terms of percent passing, 2010 saw the biggest gap by a large margin.  In 2010, high poverty schools averaged only a 36% pass rate, while low poverty schools averaged 80% passing—a gap of 44 percentage points.  That high poverty schools were more impacted by the cut score change is also indicated by the steeper slope of the high poverty line from 2009 to 2010 compared to the low poverty line.

Finally, the disaggregation of math 8 is closest to English 4, and therefore easy to see.  The raw scores of all three poverty levels show steady improvement over the five year period.  Instructively, the math 8 raw score gaps in 2009 and 2010 were identical—37 raw points in each year.  However, given the harder cut score in 2010, this identical raw score gap balloons the percent passing gap from 28 percentage points in 2009 to a whopping 54 point gap in pass rates in 2010.  Again, the pass rate gap between high poverty schools and low poverty schools nearly doubled in one year despite that the level of knowledge between the two categories remained the same.  The expanding gap is an artifact of what is defined as “passing.”  And again, the disproportionate effect of increasing cut scores on poor schools is seen in that high poverty schools have the steepest slope from 2009 to 2010.