Located in a renovated factory building in the heart of the Dutch Kills community of Long Island City, the Baccalaureate School For Global Education displays a quiet, respectable public demeanor.
But inside these halls of learning, students participate in an explosion of knowledge and study that has launched the school to the top of a list, published by U.S. News World Report, that ranks performance rates of 403 New York City schools.
Students applying to the school at 35th Street and 36th Avenue in Long Island City face a rigid admission exam that regularly eliminates 10 percent of all applicants, a city Department of Education (DOE) spokesperson said.
The school, which offers classes in three tiers of learning, also follows the International Baccalaureate Program, a college preparatory course dubbed the “most prestigious Baccalaureate course of study in the nation”, the spokesperson said.
The school’s top ranking was based on a series of principles, including whether students were outperforming their peers on reading and math tests, whether minority and low-income students tested better than similar students in city schools – and how college-ready students were at the Queens school.
The Baccalaureate School of Global Education received perfect scores on each of the performance indicators, the DOE spokesperson said. Data used in the determination was drawn from the 2009-2010 school year.
The study by U.S. News World Report states the school that boasts a student-to-teacher rate of 13.1, “promotes intellectual and social development” in small classes that “help foster mentoring opportunities with students”.
Baccalaureate School For Global Education was previously ranked 21st in the nation.
