Original Research by School Decision on Cypress Hills Ascend Charter School
Cypress Hills Ascend Charter School is a kindergarten through sixth-grade charter school operating within Kings County. The school serves a small enrollment, distributed evenly across its grade bands. The student body is predominantly Hispanic, with meaningful representation of Black and Asian students, and a small number of white and Native American students. Detailed data on free-or-reduced-price lunch eligibility, students with IEPs, and English learners was not available.
The school operates as part of the Ascend network, a larger charter organization. Beginning in the 2023-24 school year, Ascend implemented a significant curriculum overhaul across its Brooklyn schools. Cypress Hills Ascend adopted a new K-12 mathematics and literacy framework centered on a Science of Reading approach, which emphasizes phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension. For an elementary school family, this represents a foundational pedagogical shift that shapes how core instruction happens in the classroom.
The network's 2024-25 results offer concrete evidence of academic momentum. Ascend schools placed in the top portion of New York schools statewide, and Cypress Hills Ascend itself moved from a two-star state rating in 2021-22 to a four-star rating in 2023-24. Fourth-grade proficiency outperformed state averages despite the school serving a high-needs population. Year-over-year gains across the network showed substantial improvement: ELA proficiency increased significantly, mathematics rose similarly, and science gains were notably large. These results followed the curriculum implementation and reflect outcomes that outpaced state performance in each subject.
Among Kings County's districts, Cypress Hills Ascend's chronic absenteeism rate sits in the top quartile, meaning the school performs better than most peer districts on this measure. Per-pupil spending falls in the upper-middle range for the county.
One constraint to note: this entity operates only through sixth grade, so no high school programming or graduation data applies. State assessment results for the full student body were not provided in the available data, though the district brief references school-wide improvement. A parent considering enrollment would benefit from reviewing the school's most recent state assessment results and asking the school directly about proficiency rates across each grade level, given that fourth-grade performance is publicly reported but results for other elementary grades would ground enrollment decisions more fully.
The school's recent curricular investment, paired with measurable gains in both state ratings and year-over-year assessment performance, reflects deliberate academic improvement in a charter setting that serves a predominantly Hispanic, high-needs student population in Brooklyn.
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