The good, the bad, & the puzzling within the progress reports

Behind the letter grade that each city high school received this week is a mess of data.

Progress report scores take into account everything from how many ninth-graders earned six credits in academic courses to the number of overage students to the relative performance of students with special needs. The city’s spreadsheet containing the underlying data for the progress reports runs to more than 200 columns.

We sorted and re-sorted the spreadsheet to look at the city’s measures of school quality in different ways. Here are some of the most interesting things we found.

The top five highest-scoring schools include three schools for new immigrants (marked with asterisks):

Brooklyn International High School (Brooklyn)* Manhattan Village Academy (Manhattan) It Takes A Village Academy (Brooklyn)* Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design (Brooklyn) Manhattan Bridges High School (Manhattan)*

The top five lowest-scoring schools:

Manhattan Theatre Lab High School (Manhattan) High School of Graphic Communication Arts (Manhattan) Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School (Bronx) Herbert H. Lehman High School (Bronx) Freedom Academy High School (Brooklyn)

Seven schools didn’t get progress reports after their data raised red flags with department officials:

Theatre Arts Production Company (Bronx) PULSE (Bronx) School for International Studies (Brooklyn) Bronx Aerospace (Bronx) Bushwick School for Social Justice (Brooklyn) Foundations Academy (Brooklyn) FDNY School for Fire & Life Safety (Brooklyn)

Other schools where academic and management improprieties have been reported did get progress reports:

Science Skills High School (Brooklyn) got an A A. Philip Randolph High School (Manhattan) got a C Lehman High School (Bronx) got an F Washington Irving High School (Manhattan) got an F Independence High School (Manhattan) got a C Williamsburg Charter High School (Brooklyn) got a C

Three schools benefited from the new rule that prevented schools with high graduation rates from scoring lower than a C:

Bronx Prep Charter School (Bronx) Frederick Douglass Academy (Manhattan) East New York Family Academy (Brooklyn)

Seventy schools sent less than a third of their graduates to college. Of those, seven got A’s:

Fordham High School of the Arts (Bronx) High School for Violin and Dance (Bronx) Millennium Art Academy (Bronx) International Community High School (Bronx) El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (Brooklyn) International High School at Prospect Heights (Brooklyn) W. H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School (Brooklyn)

At four schools, all selective, not a single graduate would need remediation at CUNY colleges:

Staten Island Technical High School Townsend Harris High School High School of American Studies at Lehman College Queens High School for Sciences at York College

And at six schools, not a single graduate met CUNY’s basic standards:

Performance Conservatory High School (Bronx) is closing Juan Morel Campos Secondary School (Brooklyn), which got a C Bronxwood Preparatory Academy (Bronx), which got a C Opportunity Charter School (Manhattan), which did not receive a grade Arts and Media Preparatory Academy (Brooklyn), which got a B High School of Violin and Dance (Bronx), which got an A

Six of the 11 schools that began federally funded “transformation” last year saw no change. Two saw their grades fall:

Queens Vocational and Technical High School, which went from an A to a B Flushing High School, which went from a C to a D

And one saw a spectacular climb:

School for Global Studies, which went from an F to a B

Two of the schools we followed in “The Big Fix” series boosted their grades:

William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School went from a D to a B. Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School rose from a C to a B.

And one school had no chance:

Christopher Columbus High School got no grade because it has started phasing out.

Seven charter high schools got progress report grades:

New Heights Charter School, which got a A for the second year in a row International Leadership Charter School, which dropped from an A to C Renaissance Charter School, which got a B in its first year with a report Harlem Village Academy, which got a B in its first year with a report John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy, which fell from an A to a B Williamsburg Charter High School, which improved from a D to a C Bronx Prep, which got a C for the second year in a row

Ninety-two schools did not get progress report grades because they are less than four years old or are phasing out.