Harlem Success, unionized charter score high as more data flows

The data on city schools’ English Language Arts scores keeps churning out. The Department of Education has just published Excel files sorting scores by school, grade level, special education status, gender, race and ethnicity, and English proficiency from 2006 to this year. A spokesman says that figures on charter schools are on the way. In the meantime, here’s a document from the state charter school lobbyists with every charter school in the city’s proficiency rates.

In New York City, charter schools out-performed traditional public schools on the test, and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein congratulated the schools on the high scores today at a press conference in Manhattan.

Among the top scorers are two charter schools we’ve followed here: Harlem Success Academy 1 in Manhattan, notable for its founder, Eva Moskowitz, who has regularly challenged the role of teachers unions, and Renaissance Charter School in Queens, notable in part because its teachers and administrators are represented by unions.

Harlem Success, the first of a network of schools created by Moskowitz, reported state test results for the first time ever this year, thanks to its first-ever crop of third-graders, 95% of whom scored proficient on the reading test — the fourth-highest proficiency rate among New York City charter schools.

Edging Harlem Success out slightly with 95.8% of third-graders scoring proficient was Renaissance Charter School in Queens, a school whose teachers and administrators are represented by city unions — an arrangement that worked well until a bump recently, when teachers felt the union did not advocate for the school sufficiently.

The school with the highest proficiency rate among third-graders this year is Carl Icahn Bronx North Charter School, where 100% of third-graders, the school’s first ever, scored proficient. Glancing through the database of traditional public schools, I found only seven elementary schools with as many third-graders scoring proficient: NEST+m and the Anderson School in Manhattan, where admission depends on students’ scores on a citywide gifted and talented test; P.S. 150 in Tribeca; the Washington Heights Academy, a new small elementary school with a progressive bent; and P.S. 188, P.S. 191, and P.S. 205 in Queens.

Please send us trends and interesting outliers as you find them.