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Kim Gittleson's report on charter schools' performance on the city's progress reports lets users sift through every school.

We already know that charter schools’ scores progress report scores fell even more than the district schools, just as happened with the test scores. Now, in the Community section, Kim Gittleson breaks the scores down and finds diversity.

The good:

5.  The best performing charter school was Democracy Prep Charter School, which received a score of 88.9 (compared to 99.8 last year) and was ranked in the top 1% of all schools citywide. Other charter schools that were in the top 5% of schools citywide were: Williamsburg Collegiate Charter school, KIPP Infinity Charter School, and Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School.

The bad:

3.  Merrick Academy and Girls Prep — two schools that were plagued with problems with staff and space, respectively — experienced large drops in their overall Progress Report Scores and percentile rankings. Merrick Academy’s overall score dropped by over 80 points and its percentile ranking fell from 76% of all schools to the bottom 3%. Girls Prep Charter School’s score dropped by 70 points and its rank dropped from the 82nd percentile to the 13th.

Girls Prep’s plummet is especially noteworthy, since the Department of Education has attempted to support the school’s search for space, with Chancellor Joel Klein at one point offering to use emergency powers to find space. The school’s prominent board of directors includes Boykin Curry and Eric Grannis, charter school leader and politico Eva Moskowitz’s husband.

Yesterday, the city released its annual Progress Reports. Mirroring the trend with test scores, charter school progress reports suffered more than their public school counterparts, receiving a higher proportion of C and D grades and an overall lower average Progress Report score. A full breakdown of charter school performance compared to last year’s Progress Reports can be found in the spreadsheet available here.

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You may have noticed that we have a governor’s race going on in New York. But amid the love children, viral cell-phone videos, and upsetting e-mail forwards, policy issues are getting even more overshadowed than usual — including where the two candidates stand on education.

To remedy this, I’ve compiled a brief primer outlining the education stances of the Democrat, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and the Republican, Tea Party-ite Buffalo businessman Carl Paladino.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, the state's attorney general, sides with Obama and Bloomberg on education. (Photo via Flickr user saebaryo)

Andrew Cuomo

HIS CAMP: Cuomo is framing himself as the great hope that Democrats for Education Reform activists once dreamed David Paterson would be — a “Barack Obama Democrat” on education, as one source put it to me. (Or, you might say, an “ideolocrat.”)

Cuomo kept himself out of the Race to the Top legislative battle (at least publicly). But his published platform mirrors DFER’s insistence on raising the cap on charter schools, and it quotes charter supporters’ warning that a union-backed push for more public consultation before opening a charter school would have amounted to a “poison pill.”

WHAT HE MIGHT DO: Cuomo’s decision to affiliate with DFER, Mayor Bloomberg, and the entrepreneurial camp on schools gives him a potentially long education wish list. That’s because almost all of the changes favored by these reformers are legislative; teacher tenure, “last in, first out” firing patterns, teacher pensions, and charter school growth are all matters of state law.

While other state Democrats (namely Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver) have allied themselves with the teachers union, Cuomo could act as a counter-force pushing for more changes to the state’s education law. It’s worth noting that nearly all of the education agenda Bloomberg laid out this week on NBC would require changes to state law. (more…)

Monday night, I tweeted:

SLazarOtC: The last time I cried was 9/11. Ending a day of teaching by coming to #educationnation panel on Good Apples brought me close. What a waste.

On Tuesday night, the tears did come, but they were tears of joy, triumph, and pride.  I could not have hoped for a better catharsis following my experience at NBC’s Education Nation.

That night, my school held an event that I’ve never heard of happening anywhere else: a graduation ceremony for the 10 students who did not graduate on time with their classmates in June, but finished up over the summer. It was obviously an emotional night for the students and their families, but it also served a direct rebuttal against nearly every critique I heard of unionized urban public education at Education Nation over the previous few days. (more…)

• Most schools got lower grades on this year’s progress reports. (GothamSchools, Times, NY1, WSJ)
• On average, charter schools got lower grades than traditional public schools. (Post)
• Still, just 5 percent of schools got D’s or F’s. (Daily News)
• Manhattan’s PS 366 was one of only 22 schools to see a higher grade this year. (Post)
• The teachers union’s Brooklyn charter school saw one of the largest score declines. (Post)
• Harlem Success spent $1.3 million over two years on marketing, Juan Gonzalez writes. (Daily News)
• Eva Moskowitz: The city needs more law changes to let charter schools grow. (Daily News)
• After negative publicity, PS 95 in Queens will let a kindergartener go to class. (Daily News)
• More districts are starting to use Singapore math, which favors understanding over skills. (Times)
• Readers write that it’s wrong to connect Brockton High School’s turnaround to its size. (Times)
• Louisville, Ky., has replaced its rejected integration plan with new ways to mix students. (USA Today)