The Beacon School

The Beacon School (also called Beacon High School) is a college-preparatory public high school in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City near Times Square and the Theater District. Beacon's curriculum exceeds the standards set by the New York State Regents, and as a member of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, its students are exempt from taking most Regents exams. Instead, students present performance-based projects at the end of each semester to panels of teachers. In 2019, the school received roughly 6,000 applications for 360 ninth-grade seats, yielding an acceptance rate of approximately 6.2%.

Beacon was founded in 1993 by District Three educators Ruth Lacey and Stephen Stoll as an alternative to the Regents Exam-based testing system in favor of portfolio-based assessment. Lacey and Stoll "envisioned an interdisciplinary high school small enough to allow teachers to act as advisers to groups of kids, with an emphasis on computers and the arts." The school's purpose was also purportedly to keep class sizes down and total student population at, or just above, one thousand students. Over time, Beacon was forced to accept certain aspects of the Regents-based testing curriculum and to abandon its portfolio-assessment system as the sole method of graduation, which had been the case until mid-1999. Beacon now utilizes, in its own words, "traditional testing ... [but] our students' progress is largely assessed through performance-based projects, completed individually and in groups. To graduate, students must present their best work to panels of teachers."