New York City's charter schools

GRADE SHOCK: REGULAR SCHOOLS TOP CHARTERS, October 1, 2010, New York Post

…Traditional public schools bested the city's charter schools on annual report-card grades -- scoring 10 points higher on average on a 100-point scale, new data shows.

The city's more than 1,000 public elementary and middle schools averaged a B on their so-called "progress reports," which assign letter grades to schools based largely on how much students improve on state math and reading tests in a given year.

By comparison, the city's 60 charter schools that received letter grades this year averaged a C+.

"This means that either the strategy Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor [Joel] Klein have touted so often for school reform -- the creation of more charter schools -- isn't working, or that the entire progress-report methodology, which relies almost completely on standardized test scores, is flawed," said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

His union's UFT Charter School in Brooklyn was among the 70 percent of traditional public and charter schools to see their grades plummet after the state raised the passing bar on math and reading tests this summer…

The overall damage -- which saw 49 schools hit with a D grade and eight branded with a dreaded F out of the 1,140 schools graded this year -- would have been much worse if city officials hadn't set a limit on how far grades could drop.

That policy, which limited a school's downfall to two letter grades, buoyed 110 schools that otherwise would have been slapped with D's or F's, according to Department of Education data…