The top reported proficiency rate is 99% in Social studies. The lowest is 61% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Ps 31 Bayside
PS 31 Bayside sits on 46th Road in a part of northeastern Queens that carries a genuinely suburban texture inside city limits. Publicly reported accounts describe Bayside as a neighborhood of Tudor, Colonial, and Cape Cod homes set on tree-lined blocks, with Bell Boulevard serving as a walkable commercial spine of globally diverse restaurants and shops. Fort Totten Park, Crocheron Park, and waterfront paths along Little Neck Bay give the area an unusually green character for a New York City neighborhood. The LIRR Bayside station provides commuter access to Midtown, and local buses connect to the 7 train via Flushing. Housing here prices considerably above both the state and national midpoints, with values that have continued to rise over the past year, and rents similarly sit well above typical U.S. levels. Families weighing this school zone are also weighing a competitive and established real estate market.
The school serves pre-K through fifth grade, so there is no graduation rate and no high school course data to discuss. State testing covers grades three through five in math, ELA, and science, and those results offer the most direct read on academic performance.
In math, PS 31 performs solidly. Across the tested grades, a clear majority of students reach the proficient-or-above threshold on the New York State assessment, with fifth graders performing at the strongest level among the three cohorts. That math picture, taken together with ELA and science, places the school in the top quartile on the overall proficiency index relative to districts in Queens County, which is a meaningful position in a dense and academically competitive county.
ELA results are somewhat lower than math across all three tested grades, with proficiency rates in the upper fifties to low sixties range. Science at fifth grade lands in a similar range to ELA. None of these figures are alarming, but math is clearly the stronger subject, and parents who want to understand ELA trajectory may want to ask the school directly about how reading instruction is being implemented. That question has district-level context: District 26 has been subject to the citywide NYC Reads mandate, which replaced school-chosen literacy programs, including the widely used balanced-literacy approach, with phonics-based, science-of-reading curricula across all elementary schools. This is a lasting structural change, still relatively recent, and its effects on test outcomes will develop over the coming years.
A social studies proficiency figure appears in the data from a much earlier school year, too dated to be informative, and no more recent social studies results were available.
Participation rates in state testing are below the typical full-participation benchmark across most grades and subjects, which means results reflect a subset of enrolled students rather than the full cohort. That is worth noting when interpreting the proficiency figures, and a parent may want to ask the school about testing participation.
The student body is racially diverse. Asian students make up the largest single group, followed by Hispanic students, with smaller shares of white, Black, and multiracial students. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a marker of economic need, which is notable in a neighborhood whose housing market reflects considerable wealth. Enrollment spans pre-K through fifth grade at a size that is fairly typical for a New York City elementary school serving that range. Data on English learner enrollment and students with IEPs were not available in this dataset.
On the District 26 side, two other changes are worth knowing. The district participated in the first wave of NYC Solves, the math curriculum mandate that standardizes instruction at the middle and high school level, though that affects grades PS 31 does not serve. More relevant for families thinking about the longer arc: the district has been managing significant enrollment pressure in northeast Queens, and publicly reported accounts describe a series of capacity additions and a new elementary school that opened in Bayside in recent years. PS 31 families may want to understand how those capacity changes interact with zoning in their specific block.
Multi-year trend data were not available, so it is not possible to say from this dataset whether performance at PS 31 has been rising, falling, or holding steady. The current-year snapshot is solid, particularly in math, and the neighborhood context is stable and well-resourced, but the trend line is a gap that the school itself can speak to.
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