Everyone loves a good party. What makes the monthly parties at PS 151 in Brooklyn really special is that students earn them with their hard work and good behavior. 

James Gaffigan, the music director and chief conductor of Switzerland’s Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, attended public schooling on Staten Island. “If I didn’t go to public schools, I never would be where I am today,” says Gaffigan. “It’s an extraordinary gift to have a great teacher because that’s what gets kids excited about something. I remember so many of them and their passion.”

MS 35 is located on MacDonough Street in Bedford Stuyvesant and is known affectionately by the school community as the “The Miracle on MacDonough.” Its Teacher Center opened in September 2017, and the school has thrived over the past year thanks in part to Teacher Center initiatives.

Students from Manhattan's Maxine Greene HS for Imagination and Inquiry brought history to life through the words of minorities, the working poor, immigrants, rebels and dissenters, at a Lincoln Center performance that capped their two-year AP government project called Voice's of a People's History of the United States.

Lawrence Mohr is a doctor, an educator and a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, who served as the White House physician for two presidents. He is also a graduate of New York City public schools.

The intent young scientists in sterile lab coats, masks and gloves laboring at busy lab stations like professional researchers are actually 11th-graders at Union Square Academy for Health Sciences, the only high school in New York City with a pharmaceutical program.