WASHINGTON (AP) --Students in six big cities are largely behind their national peers in reading and writing, but there are pockets of promising performance, new figures show.

The 2002 urban scores are the first school-district results to be included in the report card known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The achievement yardstick, which began in 1969, had only covered state and national performance.

Six school districts volunteered to set the urban benchmark, allowing them to compare their fourth-graders and eighth-graders and to gauge whether school reforms work over time. The six are Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; the District of Columbia; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California and New York City.

For all students, the standard is "proficient," which means solid academic performance at a given grade. Nationally, only about three in 10 students reach or exceed that mark in reading and writing; urban students fared worse, with their results varying by city.

That's no surprise, educators say, because city schools have higher rates of students who are poor or speak English as a second language. The six districts all have high percentages of black or Hispanic students, who typically score below whites on standardized tests.

That achievement gap is about the same in most of the six cities as it is across the country, which suggests it is a national concern as much as an urban one, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of large urban districts.

"It's impossible to believe that the nation as a whole can raise its educational performance and meet its academic goals unless the kids in the cities do well," said Casserly, whose group pushed for the district tests.

Closing the gap
The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Education Department, runs the assessment, which periodically tracks achievement on a range of core subjects.

Closing the performance gap between the poor and the affluent, between minorities and whites, is a long-standing challenge for schools and the focus of a broad new federal effort.

The challenge for urban districts is tremendous, said Sheila Ford, an elementary school principal in Washington and a member of the board that oversees the national assessment, often called NAEP. The new tool will help, she said, because districts can measure change among groups of students, such as low-income children.

"What NAEP shows, and what couldn't be seen so clearly before, is that the education picture in these big-city school districts isn't just the dreary gray of failure," Ford said. "When students in the urban districts are compared to each other and to similar groups of students nationwide...there are fascinating, thought-provoking variations."

In nearly all cases, the city students fared better in writing than in reading.

Overall, a higher percentage of city students could read and write at a basic level or better, meaning they had at least partial mastery of skills needed for solid work. But there, too, the urban students scored below the national average in most cases.

Among the bright spots, officials said: Fourth-grade writers in New York matched the national average of students who achieved at least proficient writing -- meaning organized, detailed work that developed the main idea and showed awareness of the audience. Houston fourth-graders also performed similarly to national peers in writing.

Although the District of Columbia was included among the urban scores for comparative purposes, its results were first released with state and national data earlier this year.

Among some key findings of the city scores:

-- In writing, 11 to 27 percent of fourth-graders met or exceeded the proficient mark; 10 to 19 percent of eighth-graders. National averages are 27 percent and 30 percent.

-- In reading, 10 to 19 percent of fourth-graders reached at least the proficient level; 8 to 17 percent of eighth-graders did the same. The national average is about 30 percent in both grades.

-- New York City schools had the highest percentage of fourth-graders who scored at or above proficient in reading and writing. The district did not have enough schools participating for eighth-grade results to be reported.

-- Houston schools had the highest percentage of eighth-graders who met or exceeded the proficient level in reading and writing.