Bloomberg Polishes Education Apple

Outgoing Mayor Bloomberg tried to further burnish his education legacy with the announcement on Tuesday that city high school students achieved record high SAT and ACT scores even as scores nationwide dropped.

On top of the eight-point improvement in test scores, the number of students enrolled in advanced placement courses were also up, by 53 percent compared to 2002, the mayor added.

“Kids understand that the future is in their hands and that if they don’t get a good education, their options are going to be limited,” said Bloomberg.

The announcement came at Brooklyn’s Bedford Academy, a pet project of the mayor;s education reform efforts.

“Nationwide we are a role model of what you should do, gains no one would have predicted 12 years ago,” Bloomberg boasted.

In Brooklyn, the number of students taking advanced placement courses has doubled since 2012 and scores for black and Hispanic students also have increased, officials said. Black students at Bedford Academy increased their overall SAT scores by 14 points.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott attributed some of the success to programs they have implemented and decisions they made such as in 2007 waiving the fee for taking practice SAT’s in 2007.

“Since we started making the PSATs free, roughly 114,000 students a year have taken it compared to 36,000 students who took it before we started waiving the fee” said Walcott.

Bedford Academy is a small high school created in 2003 under Bloomberg’s small school initiative.

“Here at Bedford we take a vested interest in our children,” said Principal Adolfo Muhammad. “College and career readiness is one of the benchmarks of what we do here.”

In whatmight be his last meeting with the press on the topic of education, Bloomberg added that it was up to the de Blasio’s administration to figure out what they could do to be better but that he was happy with his administration’s work.

“You can have your own views about whether or not this school system is a good or bad school system but the numbers are clear, the numbers are there,” he said.