Elementary and middle school students in the Bronx’s District 10, which contains all of the schools in the Norwood News coverage area, scored worse than students across both the city and state on last year’s standardized math and English exams, according to data released last month.

Students in grades 3 through 8 are required to take the high-stakes tests every spring, and the scores are used, in part, to determine whether they can be promoted to the next grade level or held back. Students are given a grade number from 1 to 4, with scores 3 and over deemed “proficient” by the state.

On average, only 33 percent of District 10 students passed the English exam, compared to 44 percent of students citywide and 53 percent across the state. Math results were similarly staggered: an average of 48 percent of District 10 students passed, compared to 57 and 63 percent of city and state students, respectively.

Community Education Council President Marvin Shelton says that District 10, among the city’s largest and most crowded, has remained stagnant over the years when it comes to test scores, despite Department of Education claims that student performance is improving across the city since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the school system in 2002.

“We still seem to be struggling with the high number of level one’s and two’s,” Shelton said. “Nine years of mayoral control, and we don’t have much to show for it. Progress is at a glacial pace. They’re not strides, they’re baby steps.”

Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, however, lauded this year’s scores.

While city schools’ scores still fall below the rest of the state, Bloomberg has instead become focused on the idea of progress — city scores have been gradually going up the last two years while statewide scores have flat-lined. City students also scored higher on the tests than other large, urban districts like Yonkers and Syracuse.

“All of our students, teachers and principals should be very proud of their progress and the fact that we continue to raise achievement levels and outpace the rest of the state,” Bloomberg said in a press release.

Scores this year remained well below their peak in 2009, when 82 percent of students were proficient in math and 69 percent were proficient in English. Since then, the state toughened its exam format after complaints that the test had become too easy and predictable, adding new types of questions and lengthening the exams.

“This is real proof that when expectations are raised, our students can rise to the occasion,” Walcott said after scores were released last month.

Some bright spots in the local school results came from Norwood’s PS/MS 280, where the percentage of passing students exceeded the citywide numbers and came close to matching statewide scores; and a majority of the students at PS 51 also passed, though the school just moved out of the neighborhood for another building in Crotona, following the discovery of toxins at its former site.

Overall, though, local school scores remained a head below the rest of the city. At JHS 80 on Mosholu Parkway — deemed “consistently low-achieving” by the DOE for years now — just 16 percent of students passed the English exam; only 27 percent passed math.

Maggie Moroff, a policy coordinator at Advocates for Children of New York, said there are a number of reasons some neighborhoods score better than others. Communities with greater numbers of low-income students, students of color and English Language Learners, for example, have historically scored worse than white and more affluent students — evidence of the “racial achievement gap” the DOE and Bloomberg say they are fighting to narrow.

Either way, Moroff says, failing the tests has real consequences. Teachers are evaluated by the DOE based on the scores of their students, and students themselves can get left behind after a failing grade.

“That’s actually a real tragedy,” she said. “You have some of these kids thinking that they were going to be promoted, but then they’re [held back] based on their test performance.”