CROWN HEIGHTS — Like many schools in New York this year, elementary and middle schools in Crown Heights saw big jumps in math and English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency, but still lag behind average scores in statewide standardized tests.
More than 30 percent of students in grades three through eight in the area’s School District 17 were dubbed proficient on the ELA test and 27 percent qualified as proficient in math, according to the recently released 2016 test scores.
Those numbers are up, respectively, from 21.8 percent and 23.6 percent the previous year, New York State Department of Education data shows.
But the upward trend among test-takers wasn’t enough to push District 17 — which covers Crown Heights as well as parts of Flatbush and Brownsville — into the top half of proficiency scores. Overall in the state, ELA and math scores for elementary and middle schoolers went up 7.6, from 30.4 percent in 2015 to 38 percent in 2016, and 1.2 percent, from 35.2 percent in 2015 to 36.4 percent in 2016.
Proficiency rates in the district vary widely, from the top-scoring school, Medgar Evers College Preparatory School, with an ELA proficiency at 82.5 percent and math proficiency at 79.8 percent this year, to the two lowest-performing schools where only 9.7 percent of students passed the ELA test (the Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence) and only 3.4 percent of students passed the math exam (the School for Democracy and Leadership on Kingston Avenue).
The below map shows each pass rate for traditional public schools in District 17, reflecting data from the state education department that separates out charter school’s test results.
But it’s worth noting that, including charters, the highest-performing school in the neighborhood this year was Success Academy Crown Heights, a charter elementary school where 98.2 percent and 100 percent of students passed the ELA and math tests, respectively. The Crown Street school was one of several Success schools with remarkably high scores this year, which charter school organizations are citing as one of the primary reasons for the city's large jumps in proficiency rates, according to the Gotham Gazette.
To see how your local school did on the statewide tests, check out DNAinfo's map below:
