NYC Excels Past the Rest of the State

The NY Daily News with a spot-on editorial about the exceptional performance of NYC schools relative to the rest of the state:

To further explore how well, or poorly, the city’s students performed when tested under the new so-called Common Core standards, the Daily News ran a computer analysis that ranked every third grade through eighth grade in the state’s public schools by the percentage of kids who passed the challenging exams.

We presented our findings to Chancellor Dennis Walcott. The Department of Education confirmed the conclusions and did additional computations. The news was happily illuminating.

Across the state, 1.2 million children enrolled in 3,500 schools took the tests last spring. About one-third of the kids and schools were in the city, suggesting the city would be home to about one-third of the best. Not so. Not by a mile.

An astonishing 22 of the top 25 performing schools from Montauk to Buffalo were in the five boroughs. And they were at the top of the top.

Among the city’s stellar 22 schools, nine were in Manhattan, six were in Brooklyn, five were in Queens and two were in the Bronx. The three additional top scorers were near Rochester, in Buffalo and in Westchester.

Only 16 schools statewide boasted that more than 80% of their students passed the tests. All were in the five boroughs.

The number one, two and three schools, with pass rates of 97%, 96% and 95% were the Anderson School in Manhattan, the Christa McAuliffe School in Brooklyn and the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens.

Continue Reading...