All the papers today cover the newly released high school progress reports. The Times has a good breakdown of grades and school size, the Newshighlights a significant bump in schools earning top grades this year, with 82% earning A's or B's, vs. 65% last year, and the Postrecaps the high-scoring school, Brooklyn International, which serves new immigrants (and proudly lists a number of Peace Corps veterans as teachers), and the bottom-scorer, long-troubled Washington Irving High School.Higher grades were attributed to higher grad rates and increases in numbers of Regents exams taken (although it's not entirely clear how many students took more exams).

From the city's point of view, the high schools are doing well: 57% maintained an A for two years or moved up a letter grade, and of last year's A schools, 86% held onto that top mark. Notably, the specialized high schools all got As (save for Brooklyn Latin, which has yet to graduate a class) -- a big difference from last year -- although small, ambitious Bard High School Early College's B prompted Bard College President Leon Botstein to dismiss the grading process as "irrelevant...arrogant and misguided." Because the progress reports reward gains made by the lowest-achieving students, schools that serve the city's highest achievers, which enroll few low-level students, face particular challenges in demonstrating sufficient 'progress' to merit high marks.

For mystery-lovers, a note on the calculations: The grades are correlated with school scores, and school scores are determined, in large measure (3/4 of the grade, according to the DOE) by how the school compares with peer schools. So in practice, two schools could have identical numerical values for particular items -- graduation rate, say, or student progress -- and wind up with different grades, if they are part of different peer groups. And once again, an A here isn't an A anywhere else in the academic universe: A's start at 64.2 (of 100 points) and B's, nearly 20 points lower, at 43.5.