number of Impartial Hearings requested
number of impartials held
number of impartials decided in favor of the parent
number of impartials decided in favor of the school district

number of mediation meetings
number of mediation meetings that resulted in a resolution

number of students using assistive devices

I could go on and on adnd on and on

1- the “blue books” in excel for the last eight years, to check out the enrollment trends citywide, by district and school.

2- the underlying data that the education statistics of the MMR are based upon, including their reporting of overcrowding (which differs from the what’s reported in the blue book);

3- discharge data disaggregated by discharge code, by school and by economic status, gender and race/ethnicity for the last six years — also the discharge data of any kind for the 2007-8 school year (which still has not been released.)

4- the formula that the teacher data reports is based upon, including the sources of the input data on which they rely.

Are you going to share your request when it is made?

John Beam

The second is the School Report Cards. The state puts these together, but DOE manages the ones for NYC. They are not available in Excel spreadsheet form so you have to open each school report individually to compare data. Also, DOE has inexplicably taken down all the reports before 2004. What happened to all that historical data?? It’s nothing to keep it available.

Also, (why doesn’t my return button work on this blog?) lateness data would be very interesting – how many students late for school, how many late for class.

This opportunity really needs the public to show support.

* all ATS Reports

* School Support Organization, Tweed budgets by title

* Grades 5-8 L 1-4 by zip code

* 2007, 2008, 2009 Open Market Transfers by sending school and receiving school

* Rubber Room occupants by gender, race, school and years of experience

*2007, 2008, 2009 teacher U-ratings by school

*Student suspensions, principal and superintendents, by school, gender and race

will keep folks busy for a year ot so …

But even if they do, bulls@#t stats remain bulls#$t – the higher graduation rates, the higher state and city test scores, the lower crime rate in schools are all the result of manipulation and cheating. The grad rates go up when “credit recovery” programs hand students semester credits for writing one page “reports.” Test scores go up when you decrease the number of correct responses needed for a passing score and when you have those tests graded in-house by the very teachers who are being pressured to have students improve on tests under the eyes of assistant principals and principals whose very jobs exist only as long as the scores go up every year. And the crime rates go down when schools just stop reporting crimes (have to wonder if the “miracle” decrease in crime across the city isn’t a similar fudging of numbers by the precinct captains under the same stat scrutiny from Bloomberg as principals…)

You know, if some intrepid journalists actually did some investigative reporting of the test scores, the grad rates and the crime rates rather than just transcribing the DOE and City Hall press releases and publishing them as “news,” maybe you wouldn’t need to beg Mayor Mike to open up his databases to scrutiny. Maybe then you’d know his stats are all bulls#$t.

But then again, that would take actual work and it’s some much easier to just transcribe the p.r. releases and go home and write your novel about an intrepid reporter who speaks truth to power rather than disseminating the lies of the powerful to the powerless.