School Scores NYC

Public Elementary & Middle Schools

A prompt turned project.

"Rank the 50 best NYC public elementary schools based on a range of criteria". That's what I asked OpenAI’s Deep Research (in not so many words). It was all very helpful info, but even slight variations in the prompt created very different outputs. What I wanted was a more objective dataset to pair with all this descriptive information. It just so happens the NYC Department of Education (DOE) publishes comprehensive data on state testing and the city's own robust school evaluations.

What was initially just a personal question morphed into a data project I wanted to share with others, so I made this site to help fellow parents browse public elementary and middle school performance data. I'm not trying to sell you an apartment or list every school attribute - just trying to create a transparent, low clutter, usable tool that will help you research a good school for your family.

FAQ

What is the data source for this site?

This site is not affiliated with the City of New York. If you need to validate any data point, visit official city sources.

How do I use this site?

  • Use the map to see how schools in a given area or school zone perform, then click into any of them to get a profile of their performance.
  • Use the list to search for a specific school or filter based on location or performance criteria, then look into the profiles of your results.
  • Use the table (ideally on a desktop) if you just want to browse all the data like a spreadsheet. You can also download this file from the NYC Department of Education (DOE), which contains most of the same data.

Beyond performance data, you will find useful links to school-specific information from official NYC websites (myschools.nyc, nycenet.edu) and other helpful resources (InsideSchools, Blue Ribbon). You can also ask ChatGPT for a qualitative breakdown about the school wherever you see this button:

What schools are included on this site?

  • ON: Any school the DOE considers to be a public elementary or middle school (including Charter and Magnet schools) in the 2023-24 school year. Total is 1300+ schools.
  • OFF: Schools that only offer high school grades; private schools who are not profiled for school quality by the DOE.

Info: If you’re looking for performance and admissions data about NYC High Schools, NYC-SIFT is a great parent-created resource and community.

What does ‘zoned’ and ‘non-zoned’ mean?

  • ‘Zoned’ means the school gives admissions priority to families who live in a defined area, giving them a much higher chance of their child being accepted. Note that living in the zone is not a guarantee, especially for overcrowded programs. A common example of this is 3K and Pre-K programs at in-demand schools.

Info: Don’t confuse zones and districts - districts are generally much bigger than zones. For zoned schools, living in a district gives you much lower admissions priority than living in the zone. On the Map page, you can toggle on the elementary or middle school zones to see their boundaries.

  • ‘Non-zoned’ means the school has no associated zone, and is instead catered to enrollment from across a district or the whole city. For many non-zoned schools, living in the district gives you admissions priority.

If you’re serious about a given school, you should go to their myschools.nyc page and read their admissions priorities carefully to gauge your chances of getting in. Click here to see an example of this info for a given school.

What is the ‘All-Around’ metric? Why do some schools not have a score?

I made this score to combine each of the three ‘category scores’ (from the NYC School Quality Snapshot) into one measure of a school’s well-roundedness. It considers:

  • Instruction and Performance (50% weight)
  • Safety and School Climate (25% weight)
  • Relationships with Families (25% weight)

The weighting is my personal choice to emphasize the value of academics, but if you feel differently, you can disregard it and look at each category score individually.

Many schools don’t have an All-Around score because they are missing at least one of the three category scores. The non-academic category scores are typically missing because a school did not have enough responses to the NYC School Survey. A good example of this is the ‘Success Academy’ charter schools, that otherwise tend to have extremely high performance scores.

Info: See definitions of each category score from the city's School Quality Snapshot dashboard:

  • "Instruction and Performance rating looks at this school’s State test results, including student growth and performance; how students performed in core courses; how well students are prepared for middle school; and survey questions about instruction from the NYC School Survey."
  • "Safety and School Climate rating looks at how well the school establishes a culture where students feel safe, challenged to grow, and supported to meet high expectations; how well school leadership inspires the school community; and how well teachers participate in the continuous improvement of the school community."
  • "Relationships with Families rating looks at how well the school forms effective partnerships with families and whether those relationships are based on trust and respect."

For a more exhaustive breakdown, read the Educator Guide published by the DOE.

Why are there so many percentiles / %iles? How do you calculate them?

Percentiles are a more granular way to see where a school ranks relative to the rest of the city. 99.5 percentile means that score is better than 99.4% of all other schools. Percentiles are also helpful to understand metrics that don't have an intuitive scale.

For example:

  • Do you know if 65% of a school's students achieving Level 3 or 4 in ELA state testing is good? If I gave you the citywide average (50%), how much does that help? Maybe many schools are very close to average or maybe many schools are very far from average.
  • What about a ‘Performance Score’ of 0.6? What does that really mean?

To calculate percentiles, I group schools by whether the city classifies them as Elementary, K-8 (includes K-12 schools), or Middle. These groups then become the basis for ranking. For a given metric (like Performance Score), I order all the values in the group from highest to lowest, and find where a given school's score sits in that ordered rank.

Info: The NYC School Performance Dashboard also divides schools into Elementary, K-8, and Middle. As best I can tell, they use these groups for their own percentile rankings. I'm following their lead to keep things apples to apples.


This means scores for a K-8 school are only being compared wtith other K-8 schools, even though they overlap grades with elementary or middle schools. Similarly, elementary and middle school scores aren't ranked against K-8 schools.


This would be more problematic if there were very few K-8 schools, but New York City had 262 of them in 2024, so ranking them against each other is still very informative.

Scores aren’t everything, you know?

A rhetorical FAQ! Yes, there is much more that goes into picking a school for your child than seeing if it’s in the top 5% of citywide test-taking. Going to a school where the average performance outcomes aren't great doesn’t imply your child can’t thrive there. Similarly, good scores on the NYC School Survey aren’t a guarantee of your future satisfaction. I expect you will do much more research to find the right fit for you.

That said, the data on this site is not just raw state test results. We are fortunate to live in a city that performs its own robust evaluations incorporating student growth, healthy cultures, and family relationships into its ratings and creating scores like the Impact Score to adjust outcomes data for student populations with different attributes.

Your mileage may vary if you have specialized needs or preferences, but all else equal, this data seems to be an excellent resource to estimate future academic performance and how satisfied a family will be with their school experience.