How Do Brooklyn Elementary Schools Measure Up? Sunset Park School Tops City Math Scores

In a new ranking of New York’s elementary school programs, Sunset Park’s P.S. 172 Beacon School of Excellence was the only Brooklyn school to make the top five for test scores.

The Brooklyn exception among high-scoring Manhattan schools, 90 percent of P.S. 172’s students qualify for free lunch and almost 80 percent of the school’s students are Hispanic — yet 81.5 percent of the school passed the ELA, and 100 percent of testers passed the math exam, according to DNAinfo.

In contrast, the other schools to make the top five, which all have unique programs or Gifted & Talented groups, included the Lower East Side’s NEST+M, the Upper West Side’s Anderson School, and the Special Music School where there are no more than 15 children per grade, DNAinfo reported.

Such success from a neighborhood school is largely unseen throughout the borough, where the amount of students who passed math or the ELA frequently dropped well below 50 percent, sometimes into the single digits in certain districts.

Multiple schools in Sunset Park’s District 15, which includes P.S. 172, scored in the 80 percent range on the ELA and math tests, putting the district ahead of the majority of Brooklyn schools. Yet, what makes P.S. 172 such an incredible program remains unclear.

In 2011, P.S. 172 was the only school in Brooklyn to receive the Federal Blue Ribbon Award of Excellence for being one of the top schools in the state.

The elementary school’s ability to achieve such high-scoring students without a Gifted & Talented program and despite more than a quarter of its students having special needs or being English Language Learners is nothing short of incredible in this city.

An increasingly notable factor in ranking schools by test score is how many of their students opted out. Many of the elementary and middle schools that see the most children opting out of tests are those considered to be the most elite by parents and professionals.

[Source: DNA]

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