Something and nothing.
You go to a great school and it got a B or less because its test scores didn’t improve from the previous year. Now you understand the less than glowing report card.
You go to an up and coming school that got a great grade because its test scores did improve. Now you understand why it got the big A.
What does it mean?
Something and nothing. You know your school and you know whether it’s any good or not. No report card score is going to tell you anything that you don’t already know.
It’s all about test scores, parent surveys, and criteria designed by Chancellor Klein. But mostly it’s about which schools showed improvement over last year. That’s why schools you’d expect to get A’s got B’s or worse. They didn’t show improvement from previous years. And showing improvement is what it’s all about.
On this report card, that is.
Several esteemed elementary schools that middle-class parents often factor in to their real estate decisions — including Public School 6 on the Upper East Side, P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side, P.S. 234 in TriBeCa and P.S. 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, — received B’s. Other popular schools fared worse. P.S. 154 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, received a D, as did Central Park East I in Harlem.
The F schools range from Washington Irving High School, a large Manhattan school that has struggled for years, to the Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School, a small Bronx school that opened in 2004.