The uniformed students of Girls Prep Lower East Side Elementary walk quietly in single file through neon orange hallways, under banners with slogans for the school’s four “core values”: sisterhood, scholarship, merit and responsibility. Since opening in 2005 as the first all-girls charter school in the city, it has been part of an ongoing experiment to boost performance in public schools. And for years now, students there have been quietly defying conventional wisdom about the link between income and academic performance.

At Girls Prep, where 98 percent of students are minority and almost three-quarters come from families with such low incomes that they qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, test scores have exceeded the state median the past few years – one of only a handful of schools in the East Village to do so.

NYU Journalism’s Andre Tartar reports.