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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.

Now that the Democrats for Education Reform memo recommending education choices for Obama is circulating, people are asking me who DFER is and if they’re important.

The short answer is that they’re the ones who are stoking the war inside the Democratic Party over education. But we don’t yet know how influential they are, because the ultimate coup for them would be to get the names they want into the U.S. Department of Education — and to block the names that pointedly are not on their list. (A co-chair to Obama’s education advisory committee, Linda Darling-Hammond, is one of those people.) We won’t know whether they can do that until Obama actually makes appointments.

Now for the longer answer. (more…)