Edmund W. Gordon Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School

Proficiency rates of 55.1% in ELA and 53.9% in math put Gordon Brooklyn Lab above district averages of 53.1% and 45.9% respectively — and the 2025 jump is dramatic. ELA climbed from 44.2% in 2024, and math nearly doubled from 26.9% in 2024. Whether this reflects a real instructional shift or a smaller testing cohort is something families should ask about. Looking at individual grades, 8th graders outperform 6th and 7th (63.2% ELA, 59.7% math), while 7th grade lags behind (42.3% ELA, 45.1% math) — a common middle school pattern but worth noting. The overall score of 2.18/4 edges out the district average of 1.98, signaling modest strength.

The teacher culture here is unusually strong: 100% of teachers surveyed rate their principal as trustworthy and the quality of instruction as high, with 80% reporting strong collegial trust among peers. That's a remarkable signal of internal cohesion. The flip side is the family experience — parent satisfaction sits at 61.4%, well below the district average of 90.6%, and only 3 families responded to the survey (a 2% response rate), making that number statistically thin. Attendance is a real concern: 82.5% versus the district's 89.2%, with 30% of students chronically absent. Female students have notably higher chronic absenteeism (33.7%) than male students (27.1%), which is unusual and worth asking about.

The student body is 77% Black and 17% Hispanic, with 81.7% of students classified as having high economic need — a profile very different from the surrounding Downtown Brooklyn–DUMBO–Boerum Hill census tracts, where the median household income is $150,272 and 73.3% of adults have a bachelor's degree or higher. That mismatch is common for charter schools that draw citywide by lottery, but it shapes the school's character: Gordon Brooklyn Lab serves working-class Brooklyn families in one of the borough's wealthiest zip codes. Twenty-five percent of students have IEPs, reflecting a meaningful inclusion population.

The Downtown Brooklyn–DUMBO–Boerum Hill area is one of Brooklyn's most affluent census tracts: median household income over $150,000, 73% of adults with a bachelor's degree, and a median home value approaching $1.5 million. Only 15% of households have children, reflecting the area's young professional skew. The poverty rate of 15.5% is modest given the income figures, but the school itself serves a far more economically disadvantaged population than its address would suggest.

Excellent transit access — York St (F) is about a 2-minute walk, High St (A, C) about 4 minutes, and Clark St (2, 3) about 8 minutes away