GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Thank you Kim I always find your work informative. However, any analysis or Charter School claim on special ed enrollment is meaningless without an explanation of the special education student’s level of need. A special education student that requires speech therapy and a student that requires being in a self contained classroom are both classified as IEP but bring very different challenges to school. If the charter schools believe they enroll the same kind of students that district schools enroll then they should make their numbers public = they have nothing to hide. The truth of the matter is that they enroll students with the lowest level of need and then compare their performance with schools that enroll students with the highest level of need. The charters also do this when they claim their students are economically similar to students at the district schools. This is just not true. Once again the truth is in the details. Research has shown that charters largely enroll students eligible for reduced price lunch who are not as poor as the district school students who are eligible free lunch.
It’s time that the charters stopped distorting the facts and hiding their numbers. If this were a poker game it would be time for them to show their hand. If charters are as good as they say they are then they should have no problem making their data public. Currently when you go onto a charter’s home page using the nyc.gov/schools website you find that charter’s release almost none of the information that district schools release. What have they got to hide other than the truth?

I am suspicious of any figures that come out of DOE as I’ve seen them skew data or selectively report it too many times. Moreover, they are releasing this data now for clearly political reasons (see the Eva M. letter on another page.) Why don’t they also release the data on how many self-contained kids there are in charter schools? Isn’t that info included in the CAPS data as well? And why not post this data on the charter schools webpages?

JB I am not an expert on charter school funding however I do know that the charter schools submit bimonthly invoices on their special education enrollment to the DOE and NYSED. These invoices require the charters to identify the student’s service needs as determined by an IEP. It is my understanding that charters receive additional funding based on these invoices. But you overlook the thrust of my post. Data is a dangerous thing if used inappropriately or incorrectly and charter school advocates play fast and loose with data and stats, It is deceptive to claim special needs enrollment that approximate district school enrollment when charter students have less challenges. It is particularly misleading when charters use data to compare themselves to district schools without acknowledging they enroll less needy students. As long as charters are getting taxpayer dollars then they should be required to engage in full disclosure rather than web pages on nyc.gov/schools with no information.

In most states, charters have the same requirements as LEAs (traditional districts), and this includes data requirements.  Is this not the case in NY?  That would seem to be a “complication” in the law that makes everyone lose– parents, taxpayers, students, and charters.

I don’t believe most charter schools have students in self-contained classrooms. If a student needs that level of support, the Committee on Special Education would place them in a district-run school with self-contained classrooms or a District 75 school for special education students. I suspect the reason that charter schools don’t have self-contained classrooms is that they are too small to support such a program, though you’d think that some of the big ones with 600+ students could do it. That said, there are hundreds of district schools that don’t have self-contained classrooms either.

The DOE published data for each school on its website on the number of special education students in self-contained classrooms, in collaborative team teaching classes, and other, but charter schools aren’t in it

Aaron -
2009-2010 data were as of last week, May 5, 2010. The 2008-2009 data was from July 1, 2009.
Ellen -
I took out Opportunity and Lavelle when I first did the analysis and it only changed by around .3%. I decided to leave them in once I realized that there were quite a few schools in their respective districts that had extremely high populations of special needs students–which could mean that, like these schools, they try very hard to attract students with learning disabilities. For the overall comparison, this seemed fair.
JB -
I agree with you that confidence intervals might add another dimension. I will add, however, that when I looked at individual charter schools I compared those schools to the IEP rates of traditional public schools in the same district, broken down by grade. This seems to me to be the fairest way to look at schools, because these are similar demographics. Obviously the overall picture gets distorted, but if you look at the graph or the spreadsheet you’ll see more nuanced data on individual schools. I will look into doing your methodology, but right now the issue I’m having is with determining the appropriate Population Y, i.e. overall student population.
Sorry I don’t have answers to the rest of your questions, but I will look into it!

The NYCDOE’s increase in the number (not just percentage) of students classified as having disabilities is alarming and there is no good explanation for it. A report to the Regents last month stated that NYS’ overall classification rate had risen significantly and that 70% of that rise was due to new NYCDOE classifications. Since NYCDOE typically has about 39% of all public school students in NYS, the increase in The Big Apple is both large and disproportionate.

Serial audits have shown that the CAP computer system for reporting things re NYCDOE kids with disabilities is wildly inacccurate, and perhaps intentionally so. It was established about 30 years ago to collect and report information relative to the Jose P. consent decree. NYSED’s systems for collecting and reporting student data are similarly wildly unreliable. A Single Audit for NYS reported a few years ago that NYSED neither audited nor verified any of the student data districts reported to it under IDEA (fed. spec. ed. law) and Title 1. NYSED also does not require that districts have their student databases and reports audited and verified by anyone else.

I have numerous memos in my files from NYSED and NYCDOE officials wihch basically tell school administrators how to game each of the extant reporting systems to their own advantage. District officials are required to certify that the data they submit is correct, but since it is never audited or verified, there is – intentionally – no way that NYSED could discover that a superintendent or principal submitted grossly inaccurate and manipulated data. Even if one got caught, NYSED would do nothing about it, just as it does nothing when its own outside firms find that schools have inappropriately inflated their students’ Regents exam scores.

I have one NYSED report which indicates that a full 13% of students in any cohort or “Class” are reported as enrolled and actively attending two districts at the same time. NYSED has been aware of this for many years but has done nothing to eliminate these disabled dopplegangers from its data reports and databases. It is entirely possible that NYCDOE schools whose disabled kids are transferred to charters by their parents are then reported as enrolled and attending their old NYCDOE schools and new charters at the same time.

Because of the way the NYCDOE handles special ed. budgets, it is in charters’ interest to report all their disabled students and it is in the interest of the NYCDOE schools to keep these kids on their enrollment lists as well.

National research, funded by USDOE, has shown that a child’s actual classification has little to do with the child’s actual, objectively-assessed disability(ies). A child’s actual disablity and level of impairment and a child’s school-given special ed. classification were also reported to have no relation to the amount of money reportedly spent on that child’s special education and related services.

Then, to make things worse in NYC, the HHS OIG did audits of NYCDOE school Medicaid claims, filed to get reimbursement for related services allegedly provided to Medicaid-eligible students. In both audits, the HHS OIG reported that in at least 50% of all claims submitted and for which reimbursement had been received, there was no documentation whatsoever showing that the service claimed for had actually been provided. US DOJ secured a consent decree re the NYS and NYCDOE school Medicaid fraud last year and according to that decree, about $300 million of the $540 million which was to be repaid to HHS for fraudulent school Medicaid claims was to come from NYC. The decree specifically stated that it was secured on account of unintentional and intentional school Medicaid fraud. No matter how one plays it, the fact is that one can’t rely on NYCDOE data related to special ed. in any way, manner or form.

The disparities, including those revealed by comparisons of various NYSED databases for disabled kids with figures the NYCDOE puts out are so great that all one can reasonably say is that there should be a federal investigation to find out the source of the irregularities and then whatever federal activities are appropriate after that to clean it up.

And simply for fun, last time I did a surveillance of a D. 75 school and counted heads going in, the school reported attendance for the day(s) in question exactly double the number of heads I tallied.

Before anyone puts down charters for enrolling too few kids with disabilities, we really need a good audit, via physical sampling and head counting, of the kids with disabilities who actually attend NYCDOE schools. The only study I ever saw which tried to do something in this area reported that by high school, a full 50% of the disabled kids scheduled to attend resource rooms never showed up in them.

Since charter schools are by lottery, IEP students, like all general ed students, enter the lottery & if picked are enrolled at the school. Unlike traditional DOE schools, some, not all charter schools do 1 of 3 things:

1. Counsel an IEP student out (depending on the disability)

2. Allow the students to stay – even if the disability really does warrant a more restrictive (12-1-1) environment. *Getting extra $ for a student the school KNOWS would thrive in a different setting.

3. Change the student’s IEP to reflect an environment that would be equal to what the charter school can actually provide (CTT, SETTS, etc).

All three options are a GROSS negligence and diservice to the child and their unsuspecting family. My DOE school has received many “IEP transfers” from the charter school we co-locate with and the parents all stated that the charter school knew up front what their child’s IEP stated but claimed it could offer the same or better if they “waived their rights to placement” so the child could stay at the charter school without the school being penalized for being “out of compliance.” The parents of course want what they feel is best for their child, and seeing 2 teachers in every classroom, new smart boards and technology, figures that their child is better off in this environment not realizing that their child’s IEP was written with their child’s needs in mind which is why CTT, 12-1-1 or a D75 type setting was put on the IEP in the first place.

Most charter schools may mean well when it comes to children with special needs, but if they really want to level the playing field in public education, then no matter the school’s philosophy or mission – all new charter schools should have a self-contained, real CTT or bridge class on EVERY grade in addition to their general ed classes. That would partially demonstrate equity with regards to special education students in NYC and transparent accuracy in the data that is reported to the city & state education departments.

The other thing charter schools can do is hire experienced, qualified social workers & special ed staff and provide adequate SPED training to their entire staff to be better equiped to address the varied needs of our city’s special education population. Charter schools will only be able to cousel out and pass along but so many children with IEP’s.

JB – NYSED reported that its new SIRS student data system (unique student identifier) showed 13% of the first graduating class it covered as enrolled and attending 2 districts at the same time back in 2006. I recently FOIL’d its protocol for resolving such disparities and was told it was still “under development.” Having followed NYSED’s data games for several decades now, I believe it never will come up with a meaningful, verifiable system for resolving the dopplegangers for various political and financial reasons.

The CT state ed. dept. started doing something with a similar unique student identifier system this past year in regard to kids reported by a district as having transferred to another district (instead of being reported as dropouts). It used the new system to verify the re-enrollments reported. Sure enough, when run through this system with state ed. doing verification, the state’s reported graduation rate plummeted and its dropout rate went sky high.

The first negative federal audit reporting that NYSED didn’t verify any student (or financial) data districts reported under both IDEA and Title 1 was in 2004. A USDOE OIG audit dated late ’09 which only looked at districts’ financial reports for these federal grand programs showed that NYSED still wasn’t auditing or verifying districts’ financial reports for these grant programs.

It is unfortunate, but very clear, that unless and until the feds put their collective foot down and tell NYSED “no mas federal money” until it cleans up the NYS district and state reporting act, bigtime, nothing meaningful will be done.

Not such a big deal. All it means is that for any cognizable, identifiable group of students, the real margin of error when using both NYSED and NYCDOE data is plus or minus 30% … at best. In the current debate re charters and kids with disabilities, it really does mean that it is just as likely that charters enroll a far higher proportion of kids with disabilities than do NYCDOE schools as it does that they enroll a lower percentage.

Everyone (except the children and taxpayer victims) loves this system because it means both sides (teachers and school district administrators/school boards) can find and spin numbers to prove whatever they want, whenever they want and nobody can really prove they’re wrong. All the opposition can do is come up with a different set of equally unreliable, unverifiable numbers and … . Kids and their parents lose, taxpayers lose, but them winning has little to do with the operation and governance of these large governmental systems.