Success Academy Charter School - Bergen Beach

This is a school well above its district on every academic measure. Math is the stronger suit at 91.3% proficiency — roughly 31 percentage points above the district average of 60.5% — and ELA at 86.1% sits about 25 points above the district's 61%. The trajectory tells a useful story: pre-pandemic scores were elite (100% ELA, 98% math in 2017), they fell hard in 2022 (72% ELA, 76% math) as they did almost everywhere, and they've since rebounded sharply, especially in math. ELA is still working its way back to its 2017 peak, but the direction is clearly upward.

The 94.1% attendance rate is meaningfully above the district average of 91.4%, suggesting families are showing up consistently. The parent survey numbers are striking — 100% satisfaction, 100% parent-teacher trust, 100% parent-principal trust — though the response rate of just 1% (six families) means those numbers reflect a very small, possibly self-selected slice. Day-to-day, this is a Success Academy school, which means structured routines, high academic expectations, and a culture that prizes results.

The student body is 73% Black, 10% White, 6% Asian, 6% Hispanic, and 4% multiracial — predominantly Black and serving a population that doesn't mirror the surrounding neighborhood's demographics, which is whiter and more suburban in feel. About 58.8% of students qualify as economically needy, and 9% have IEPs, so this isn't a school that filters out struggling learners. The charter draws from a wider area than the immediate neighborhood, which is part of why the demographics diverge from the census profile of the surrounding blocks.

Marine Park-Mill Basin-Bergen Beach is a solidly middle- and upper-middle-class stretch of southern Brooklyn where most households own their homes (74%) and the median home value sits near $789,000. Median household income is about $108,000 with a poverty rate around 7%, and roughly a quarter of households include children. It reads as a car-first, school-by-bus kind of place — quiet residential streets, driveways, and a family-oriented rhythm rather than the denser, transit-served neighborhoods further north.

There are no subway stations within a 20-minute walk of the school, so families drive or use local buses to get there.