Thursday, October 1, 2026
The results of the New York State Education Department’s math and English language arts Common Core assessments for grades 3 through 8 are in, and Oceanside has outperformed the statewide proficiency rates overall, and in a number of other notable categories.
Oceanside’s ELA proficiency rate is ten points higher than the state’s 40 percent average. On the math tests, 65 percent of Oceanside students demonstrated NYSED-set standards of proficiency compared to 40 percent of students statewide. That proficiency rate was also 9 points higher than Nassau County’s overall rate.
Tara Mauer, the director of mathematics for the Oceanside school district said that she attributed the district’s relative success to “high-quality” professional development for teachers, ensuring that math topics translate clearly across grade levels, and continuous analysis and modification of the curriculum in response to the changing learning standards for math, which she characterized as being in a “constant state of motion… for the past number of years.”
English Language Learners saw significant gains in both English and math proficiency rates from last year. For ELA, the proficiency rate more than quadrupled from 4 percent to 17 percent, which is about three times higher than both state and county rates. In math, ELL proficiency jumped from 2 percent to 23 percent, which is ten points higher than the state and eight points higher than the county.
“It is always gratifying when we see that our students are excelling, ” Oceanside’s director of world languages, Dr. David Rose, said. He credits the dedication of ENL teachers, as well as administrators and the superintendent, “who are all committed to providing our English languages learners with the supports they need to be successful. In addition, we embrace the belief that all teachers, regardless of their content area, are also teachers of ELLs.”
NYSED’s numbers, which can be found at data.nysed.gov, also show a disparity between boys’ and girls’ proficiency rates in Oceanside. Between 2016 and 2017, girls’ 66 percent math proficiency rate is up three points from last year, surpassing the boys’ proficiency rate of 63 percent, 2 point lower than 2016.
“Boys generally do better in math than girls do,” said Hofstra Professor and testing expert Dr. Bruce Torff. “Normally you expect a slight advantage.” Torff said that he thought the reason for this was “stereotype threat,” whereby students “feel more comfortable succeeding in different things” based on “various social constructions of what gender means.” He called notions that students are “genetically predisposed” to one subject or another “overblown.”
The gender gap is even more pronounced in the ELA sphere. The 12-point gap in 2016 grew to 20 points in 2017.
What we can learn from the data, Torff said, is that “Common Core is not closing the gender gap in ELA. And these results show that the Common Core math system is not working as well for boys, and in fact, it has opened up a new gender gap in math, one that favors girls.”
He added, “You could call this a result of the law of unintended consequences.”
