About Urban Districts

The Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), a special project in NAEP, began assessing performance in selected large urban districts in 2002 with reading and writing assessments, and continued in 2003 and 2005 with reading and mathematics.

In 2005, ten urban school districts participated in the TUDA at grades 4 and 8: Atlanta City School District, Austin Independent School District, Boston School District, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, City of Chicago School District 299, Cleveland Municipal School District, Houston Independent School District, Los Angeles Unified School District, New York City Public Schools, and San Diego Unified School District. Results for District of Columbia public school students, normally included along with NAEP's state assessment results, are also reported.

Student samples in these 10 districts were enlarged beyond usual NAEP samples so that reliable district-level data could be produced. The results for these districts are for public school students only. 

Representatives of the Council of Great City Schools worked with the staff of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) to identify districts for the trial assessment. Districts were selected that permitted testing of the feasibility of conducting NAEP over a range of characteristics, such as district size, minority concentrations, federal program participation, socioeconomic conditions, and percentages of students with disabilities (SD) and English language learners (ELL).

Urban district results are compared with results for public school students in large central cities and the nation. Results from the TUDA are based on comparisons between students in urban districts and large central city schools because these schools represent a peer group and are an appropriate comparison.

"Large central city" on these web pages includes public schools located in large central cities (with populations of 250,000 or more) throughout the United States within metropolitan statistical areas as defined by the federal Office of Management and Budget. The term is not synonymous with "inner city." Some districts (Austin, Charlotte, Cleveland, Houston, and Los Angeles) encompass a small percentage of schools not classified as large central city. In these cases, the data from the entire district were used in statistical comparisons to large central city schools. For more information, see the United States Census Bureau website.

The contents of the NAEP reading and mathematics assessments are based on frameworks, which describe in detail how reading and mathematics should be assessed by NAEP. The framework for each assessment was developed through a comprehensive national consultative process and adopted by NAGB.

Find out what the reading assessment measures and the mathematics assessment measures.

Read more about the TUDA in reading and the TUDA in mathematics.