Barbara Martinez with an excellent piece of reporting on two NYC middle schools that share the same building and have identical students – yet produce massively different outcomes:

At the heart of Chancellor Joel Klein's strategy to close failing New York City schools is a belief that demographics don't predict destiny.

Perhaps no place in the city embodies that idea better than 1224 Park Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There, two middle schools—M.S. 334 and M.S. 354—share a building. Each is 90% black and 10% Hispanic. The special-education population is roughly the same at about 30%. Their budgets are based on the same formula.

Yet the schools vastly differ in student performance. M.S. 334 was on Mr. Klein's list of schools to be closed—an order that has been put on hold by a court ruling. For two years in a row, it scored a C on its progress report, including last year, when most schools in the city scored an A. Fewer than 30% of its children were proficient in English and less than 40% were proficient in math.

One floor away, the students at M.S. 354 showed a different trajectory. Half of the kids at the A-rated school are proficient in English, right about average for black eighth-graders across the city. About 65% were proficient in math, higher than the city average for black eighth-graders.

Both schools were the smaller byproducts of I.S. 390, a giant and violent school that had inhabited the same building but was shut down in 2005. Its principal, Kathleen Clarke-Glover, became principal of M.S. 334. For M.S. 354, the Department of Education put in place Monique Campbell, who was fresh out of the New York City Leadership Academy, the city's fast-track principal-training school.

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