Eighty-two percent of students came to school today citywide, well below the average daily rate of 92 percent, according to preliminary attendance data posted on the Department of Education’s website.

Attendance was lowest at high schools and in pockets of Brooklyn and the Bronx. At several schools where daily attendance averages about 75 percent, including Banana Kelly High School and Lehman High School in the Bronx, only about 40 percent of students showed up today.

Assemblyman Karim Camara told GothamSchools that parents reported low attendance in many Central Brooklyn schools. On Twitter, Brooklyn high school teacher Stephen Lazar said only 50 to 60 percent of his students had come to school today. Another teacher, Janine Whitman, said only 2 of her 12 students were in class this morning. ”We were missing many students AND teachers today!” wrote Mark Anderson, who teaches at an elementary school in the Bronx.

One reason for the low attendance is persistent concerns that gang violence will spike on Halloween, thought to be a popular day for initiation challenges. In 1997, vigorous warnings by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Chancellor Rudy Crew prompted 40 percent of students citywide to stay home, and many schools canceled afternoon activities.

A teacher said students at his Bronx high school, where at least a third of students were absent today, had warned him of increased gang violence on Halloween.

“Some of my students told me for my own safety’s sake that while biking home through the Bronx I should watch out for groups of young men in bright red or black hoodies and should steer clear of them,” he said in an email. “Some of my students said that they had arranged for rides in cars to and from school today because gangs hang out outside the 2 train stop in their neighborhood. Our students were also excused from uniforms for today so that they wouldn’t get harassed during their commute.”

Rumors of mass violence did not pan out in 1997 or periodically over the years when they have resurfaced.

A South Bronx high school teacher said she thought her students knew they had nothing additional to worry about today.

She said her students are “kids who are not afraid of gang violence but know that attendance is historically low and they won’t be missing much.”

Chart showing the exit paths of teachers from the ATR pool during October

The hiring took place during a time when the department shuffled teachers in the ATR pool to new positions every week, under the terms of an agreement with the teachers union.

The city and UFT say the agreement is meant to match more teachers with open positions. But at a union meeting for ATRs last month, some teachers speculated that the weekly assignments were intended to frustrate ATRs into resignation.

Numbers from the first month have not borne out that theory. Of the teachers who left the pool, 172 found new positions, 11 took a leave from the DOE, and 18 exited the school system entirely. Altogether, nearly 750 teachers have exited the pool since mid-August, when the city said 1,940 teachers were without permanent positions.

The new numbers show that the pool of teachers without permanent positions has settled at roughly the same size every year for three years, even though principals faced with shrinking budgets have cut jobs each summer. There are currently 1,200 teachers in the ATR pool, 77 fewer than last year at this time and 47 fewer than in November 2009.

The 38 percent exit rate is higher than last year, when 28 percent of teachers in the ATR pool in early September had found jobs or otherwise exited the pool by the end of October. The comparison is not perfect: This year’s baseline was measured weeks before the start of the school year, a time when the excess pool typically shrinks as principals fill last-minute vacancies.

Teachers whose positions were eliminated this summer found new jobs at the highest rate. Ten percent of the 1,139 teachers excessed this year who were in the ATR pool at the start of the year found new jobs this month. Teachers who have been in the pool longest were the least likely to have found new jobs. Just 4.4 percent of the 68 teachers who had been in the pool since 2006, when it was created, found new jobs this month.

The 1,200 teachers who remain in the ATR pool include 329 elementary school teachers, 131 science teachers, 109 special education teachers, and 94 math teachers.

Moskowitz was holding an informational meeting at a public library about her newest school, which the Department of Education has proposed siting in a Cobble Hill building that currently houses two secondary schools and a program for severely autistic students. But the roughly 15 parents who said they came to learn more about Cobble Hill Success Academy, which would open next fall, were easily outnumbered by opponents of Moskowitz’s bid to open a school in the area.

Last week, the opponents said they planned to stand outside the Carroll Gardens library during Moskowitz’s noon information session, but freezing rain drove them inside, where they distributed brochures criticizing Cobble Hill Success and charter schools more generally.

Shouting, “We have information for parents also! This district doesn’t have failing schools, it has successful elementary schools!” they interrupted a presentation made by parents from the Upper West Side school that was Moskowitz’s first foray into a neighborhood that, like Cobble Hill, includes many middle-class families and high-performing schools.

As the back-and-forth between audience members and presenters grew more confrontational, Moskowitz admonished the crowd.

“This isn’t a protest meeting, and there are parents who need to understand if they do like this option,” she said. “They’re not going to be able to make that determination if we can’t have a discussion. You’ve got to be able to kick the tires, know your options.”

Later, shouts erupted again while Moskowitz was describing her background as a parent, former City Council member, and charter school founder. After Benjamin Greene, the president of the parent council for nearby District 13, called out, “All you’re doing is pitting people against to each other,” Moskowitz ended her presentation before discussing the new school.

“If you can’t hear me out we’ll have to cancel the meeting because I can’t shout over you,” she said, then left the stage area of the basement meeting room.

The Upper West Success Academy parents had had more luck communicating with the crowd, which was comprised of nearly 100 parents, teachers, and members of the Community Education Councils for Districts 15 and 13, the Coalition for Public Education and the Grassroots Education Movement.

Upper West Success parents described the network’s schools, noting an emphasis on college preparation. They also sympathized with some of the sentiments that protesters expressed.

“I had all your same concerns,” J.C. Renners, whose daughter Grace is in kindergarten at Upper West Success, told the protesters. ”You say ‘Access to a high quality public education isn’t something that should be won in a lottery,’ and I couldn’t agree more. I feel so bad for all the kids who don’t have access to quality education, and that included our daughter before we had this option. We were zoned for a failing school.”

The three elementary schools nearest to the Baltic Street site proposed for Cobble Hill Success — P.S. 29, P.S. 58, and P.S. 261 — are all high-performing and serve many middle-class families. But the surrounding district, District 15, also includes struggling elementary schools and students who live in housing projects.

Jackie Johnson, a parent whose daughter attends P.S. 32, located in nearby Boerum Hill, said she believes the charter school is being wrongly championed as a savior for the neighborhood, which boasts high-performing district elementary schools but not enough seats for every interested family.

“There is no way that the creation of this one charter will do anything to alleviate the overcrowding in these districts,” she said after the meeting. “They were saying that this school gives choices, but I came here to say it takes choices away.”

After leaving the stage, Moskowitz talked to several attendees one-on-one briefly before leaving the meeting room entirely. Officials from the network held informal informational sessions with small groups of parents in the room until shortly after 1 p.m. 10 Brooklyn parents at the event offered to hold information sessions in their homes later this year, according to Jenny Sedlis, SCN’s spokeswoman.

Marc Griffin, a Cobble Hill father of a 2-year-old, said he regretted braving the snow, only to walking away with little information on the proposed school.

“I’m zoned for P.S. 29. But I’m interested in learning more about this,” he said. “I wish they had gotten to the actual programming. There will be opposition no matter what you do — so you give the presentation.”

A public hearing on the co-location is set for Nov. 29, in advance of the Panel for Educational Policy’s vote Dec. 14.

Moskowitz is holding an informational session tomorrow to detail her plans for a new charter school that is likely to open in the affluent Cobble Hill neighborhood next year. Most of tomorrow’s protesters are parents from the neighborhood, who say they are planning to attend the meeting to tell Moskowitz that the Success Charter Network is not wanted there.

Opposition is also starting to rise from another group: School leaders in the Baltic Street building where the city has proposed to house the new school. The principals say they are nervous that the charter school’s presence could derail their attempts to improve their schools.

“We have had monumental success this year, and I’m concerned about how we can sustain that with another school added to the building, with the division of space,” Joseph O’Brien, principal of the School for Global Studies, one of the three schools currently housed in the building, told GothamSchools last week, before the co-location plan was announced. 

His school, which is in its second-year of “transformation,” a federally-funded school improvement program, moved from an F to a B on the annual high school progress reports this year. “I wonder, for a school that’s moved so far, how could they lay that at my feet?”

Another principal inside the building, Fred Walsh of the School for International Studies, said he is also worried the co-location will put a strain on the shared space, which the DOE identified as under-enrolled this year.

“To have four schools in the building, to put 190 more students in here, means huge class sizes, which would really, really impact our programming,” he said. “It would be really, really upsetting to both schools.”

Walsh’s and O’Brien’s schools enroll mostly African-American students, many of whom hail from public housing, in an neighborhood that is predominantly white. Nearby, P.S. 29 is known for its white, middle-class student body, while two other elementary schools, P.S. 261 and P.S. 58 in the neighboring Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens communities, also serve largely middle-class populations.

Success Network officials defended the plans to colocate in other schools, citing the Independent Budget Office’s findings that district schools co-located with charter school are less likely to suffer from overcrowding issues.

“We’ve made the decision, so the goal of meeting is to introduce parents to our school model,” said Jenny Sedlis, Success Academy’s director of external affairs. She said the school will replicate the Success Charter Network schools in Manhattan, the Bronx, and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

The parents organizing tomorrow’s protest were originally concerned that the charter would be located in their school, M.S. 447, a selective middle school with many middle-class families and a special program for autistic students. Parents there say they are relieved that their school is off the hook. But they said they would keep protesting Success Charter Network’s move into Brownstone Brooklyn.

“We know that things can always change. We are continuing to mobilize to keep the parents and community involved, until its really done and final decisions are made,” said Valerie Price Ervin, whose son attends M.S. 447.

Protesters from that school, other area schools, and several community organizations are planning to rally outside the Carroll Gardens Library tomorrow during Moskowitz’s presentation.

“If they’re not going to put it in our school, then we are still in opposition—not in 447, not in any public schools,” said Isemene Speliotis, a parent-teacher association member at M.S. 447 who is organizing the protest.

The purpose of Moskowitz’s meeting will be to demystify the charter school network’s academic philosophy for parents who are not familiar with charter schools, Sedlis said.

Though attendees will have an opportunity to provide feedback after hearing from Moskowitz, she said Success Academy leaders have already decided to move forward with their plans.

A panel yesterday offered a novel answer: Neither. Supports should target students in school, through teachers, they said, but they shouldn’t be purely academic.

Those supports, panel members said, range from teaching students skills to calm down during a rage to helping parents access social services they might not even know they are eligible for.

The panel featured leaders from three city organizations devoted to providing these supports: Drema Brown, the vice president of education at the Children’s Aid Society, Pamela Cantor, president of the non-profit Turnaround for Children, and Robert Hughes, president of New Visions for Public Schools, as well as James Shelton, the Obama administration official who heads up innovation efforts.

In the past, “Words like ‘social and emotional development’ of children were in the margins, nice to do, but not essential,” Cantor said. “A conversation is being framed today that we all can get behind, that a high-performing, high-poverty school has to do a lot—a lot more than is asked of schools to do.”

At one point, a person in the audience praised the direction of the conversation but asked the panel why their topic — students’ social and emotional needs — gets short shrift in the education debate.

“Well, our communications strategy sucks!” Shelton responded, to laughter from the audience. 

He then backpedalled, taking some responsibility for a conversation that more often focuses on labor disputes and teacher quality issues.

“We spent a lot of time, especially in the first two years [of the Obama administration], leading into a set of policies that have been very hard to get done in this country,” Shelton said. “We have disproportionately used our voice on those things that we think are hard, and I think in that context we have also lost focus on those things that are also important.”

Indeed, this year, Cantor and Hughes’ organizations are using a federal school improvement grant to build social and emotional supports into a struggling Queens high school. Their organizations are partnering to turnaround John Adams High School, which is receiving federally funding under the “restart” school improvement program.

“We’re talking about a whole child,” said Brown, who is spearheading the creation of a community charter school that will offer wrap-around social services to families. “To think that I can change that child’s outcomes for the future by just teaching well is not smart. we’re smarter than that.”

Dania Reid, of the Charter Parent Action Network, speaks at a town hall event with elected officials.

If charter school advocates had any concern that Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries wasn’t on their side, he lay their worries to rest last night.

Jeffries, a U.S. House of Representatives hopeful who has not always supported charter schools in his district, pledged his full-fledged support to charter school parents and backers at a town hall event hosted by the New York City Charter Center.

“The aspirations of parents such as yourself, who just want to find a vehicle to provide young children with the opportunity to get the best possible education … is one that I will always support, notwithstanding the consequences from those who may want to defend the status quo,” Jeffries said.

The event reflected a move among supporters of the city’s policy of closing struggling schools and replacing them with new options, including charter schools, to preempt the heated fights over co-location that engulfed the city last year. Nineteen new charter schools are slated to open in the city next year, and the city is hoping to house many of them in public school buildings.

Thursday’s event took place in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s New Beginnings Charter School, a second-year school located in a private facility owned by the Archdiocese of New York. It was the first such event organized by the center’s parent advocacy group, the Charter Parent Action Network. According to David Golovner, a vice president for the center, the network is working with parents in dozens of charter schools this year to help mobilize support in areas where charter schools are more densely located and where more are likely to open in the future.

“It comes down to the simple fact that these are public schools and screaming at somebody about a school isn’t the way to solve any problem,” Golovner said.

Golovner was joined by Cara Volpe, the center’s newly hired director to oversee relations between charter and district schools.

Jeffries was the lone elected official to attend the town hall, although staffers representing Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, City Councilman Al Vann and U.S. Rep. Ed Towns also participated. Recy Dunn, executive director of the charter school office at the Department of Education, also attended and spoke briefly.

Jeffries’ support of education reform issues has become more pronounced in recent months as he prepares a run at Towns’ seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Last year, Jeffries was an outspoken critic of the city Department of Education as the lead plaintiff on a lawsuit against Mayor Bloomberg’s appointment of Cathie Black to serve as chancellor. And as the DOE prepared to close a struggling middle school in Prospect Heights and replace it with a charter school, Jeffries attended a parent rally and pledged to fight the co-location with legal action.

But this summer, seeking to boost the profile of his newly announced campaign, Jeffries penned an op-ed explaining his opposition to a lawsuit against charter school co-locations. The move landed him on the “Hot List” maintained by Democrat for Education Reform and the group’s political action committee and its allies have since raised thousands of dollars for his campaign.

After the event, Jeffries repeated his support for charter school co-locations, saying they were important “given the reality that space is limited and real estate is so expensive.”

But he also criticized the DOE for not handling school space planning well in past years and said he hoped to see an improvement under new leadership.

“We’re hopeful that moving forward, under the leadership of Dennis Walcott, the approach that he takes will be more collaborative and less designed to create the types of conflicts that we’ve seen around co-locations in the past years,” Jeffries said.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew joined Mayor Bloomberg and other union leaders to announce new pension reforms

Management of the teachers’ retirement fund is being merged with other public pensions systems under a proposal unveiled today by city officials and union leaders.

In an effort to chip away at the rising costs of the city’s $120 billion pension fund, Mayor Bloomberg and Comptroller John Liu announced a proposal to overhaul city unions’ scattered pension systems. Until now, each of the five different funds – for teachers, police, fire, school employees and other public sector — had been managed by a handful of trustees under the comptroller’s office.

Under the proposal, the pools of money from each union will be kept separate but the same professional investors will manage all of the funds. Those investors will not be part of the comptroller’s office and will not change when a new comptroller is elected, as they have in the past.

Bloomberg, Liu, and union leaders said today that the fund’s underperformance had resulted in part from its management structure.

But the proposal does not address other issues underlying the city’s growing pension costs, which have soared in the last 10 years. Last year, the city contributed $8.4 billion in payouts to retired city workers, up from just $1.2 billion a decade ago, when the pension funds do not generate enough earnings to match promised returns.

With over 200,000 members, the teachers’ $42 billion retirement fund, called the Teacher Retirement System (TRS), is also one of the city’s largest and costliest. As we reported last year, the fund took a hit from the 2008 financial crisis, which was compounded by a series of pension perks that were approved in the years before it:

The sweeteners reduced the retirement contributions for teachers and principals, putting more of the burden to pay for pensions onto the city. They also allowed per diem salary — money teachers make for taking on extra tasks like running after-school clubs and sports — to be counted in the overall final salary number. And, in 2008, a provision allowed teachers to retire early without being dinged in their pension earnings.

Together, the rising salaries and pension sweeteners have created a perfect storm: increasing costs just as the plan’s performance has plummeted in the down market. Although the TRS has not performed significantly worse than the market according to the new report, the annual rate of return it assumes — 8 percent — is high by most private standards. (To be fair, most public pension plans also use a number around 8 percent. Similar private sector plans assume a rate of around 4 percent.)

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew downplayed concerns about specifics in the UFT’s pension plan today and lauded the reforms, saying the agreement shows that unions could collaborative with the city.

“Today what you see here is an announcement about the labor leaders of this city getting together with elected officials to say we can do things better on behalf of our city,” Mulgrew said at a press conference today where he was joined by leaders from each of the unions affected by the proposal.

But fiscal watchdogs said the proposal would not create lasting improvements in the city’s pension situation.

“This is a drop in the bucket and doesn’t begin to address the real problems the city has on its hands,” said Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who studies urban economics. “The only way to solve this problem is to reduce the benefits of workers, which are extravagant.”

Mayor Bloomberg said he would travel to Albany to lobby the reforms with state legislators, who ultimately have to approve the proposed changes.

In 2009, over the objections of some members of the Assembly who said doing so would waste scarce resources, state legislators passed a bill to create a parent-training center in New York City. The bill was one of four amendments that Senate Democrats required before they would agree to renew Mayor Bloomberg’s control of the schools.

That center was supposed to cost $1.6 million, which the city and state would jointly supply. It would have been housed at CUNY. And it would have trained parents who normally wouldn’t get involved to serve on community education councils and school leadership teams.

But it never got off the ground. The Department of Education said at the time that it was unwilling to pony up its portion of the costs unless the state contributed, too. And the state’s funding never materialized.

This time around, the city won’t be relying on the state for its parent training center. Walcott did not name a price tag for the new initiative, which will start in 2012, but he said the city would pool public and private funds to pay for it. A DOE official said the public funds would not come from the same pot that would have helped fund the CUNY training center.

A similar initiative in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenberg school system, which DOE officials said is a likely model for the program that the city will put in place, has been funded entirely with private dollars from local and national foundations and companies.

Charlotte parents said the district’s Parent University, which offers open training courses at schools throughout the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school system, has brought more parents into the schools and equipped them with skills, knowledge and resources to help navigate their child’s education. More than forty course titles offered for Fall 2011 include “Homework Without the Headache” and “Creating a College Timeline.”

Paula Finn, a parent of a sixth grade Charlotte-Mecklenberg school system student, has attended over twenty courses since the program launched in 2008.

“Before, I didn’t have any idea about the school system,” Finn said. “The Parent University classes have helped me answer questions that I wouldn’t be comfortable asking people.” For example, she said she felt odd asking her son’s teachers and principal about the purpose of standardized testing and was thankful when that was addressed in a Parent University course.

Finn said that since Parent University courses are hosted at schools throughout the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school system – ranging from the affluent to the impoverished – there is a cross-section of parents being brought into conversation with each other.

Over the years she has attended courses on topics that are directly relevant to her son – like transitioning to sixth grade and gifted education. She has also attended workshops on topics like gangs, which don’t immediately pertain to her son, but which keep her in tune with broader concerns in education.

Madelyn Miller, a family advocate at Reid Park Academy, a low-income school in Charlotte, said she had been running workshops for parents even before Parent University launched. But she said the city’s effort had allowed her to advertise more widely and attract a larger audience. And she praised the city’s program for spreading courses across the district and bringing programs to parents upon request.

“They make it convenient. No excuses – that’s what we try to put out there,” Miller said. “Parents don’t have an excuse not to attend.”

Outside, an organizer lobbies security to let protesting parents inside; In the auditorium, the audience was far more subdued than last night.

The Department of Education will replicate other cities’ parent training programs and start measuring how well schools engage families, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced tonight.

In his first-ever policy address last month, Walcott unveiled an initiative to help the city’s long-struggling middle schools. Tonight, he turned his attention to another weak spot in the department’s record: keeping parents involved.

Addressing parent leaders at an RSVP-only event where he was joined by Jesse Mojica, head of the department’s oft-renamed family engagement office, Walcott outlined a plan that he said would boost parent involvement in city schools. He said the department would hire outside groups to run training workshops for parents who want to get involved, ask more from parent coordinators, and put more information for parents online, at a new portion of the DOE website for families.

Walcott also said the city had developed standards for family involvement that a small number of schools would test before they are rolled out citywide. Ultimately, he said, the city plans to measure schools on how well they communicate with parents and make them feel welcome.

The speech comes after years of complaints that DOE decision-making has shut parents out — and months after elections for district parent councils went so badly that they had to be redone. Walcott acknowledged problems with the elections and promised that the next time they happen, in 2013, the process would go more smoothly.

But he did not open the door to giving parents a larger role in setting city education policy.

“I want to state clearly what we mean by successful family engagement in New York City schools: Family engagement means informing and involving parents to get students on track for college and careers,” he said before launching into the new initiatives.

A centerpiece is a new training program for parents and parent coordinators that would start in the 2012-2013 school year.

“We’re very serious about having an academy,” Walcott told reporters after the speech. “And we believe in this. We see where it works in other cities and people have talked to use about that.”

The model the DOE will likely pursue is the “parent university” that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., school district operates. Walcott did not specify a price tag for the initiative but said funding would likely come from both public and private funds.

Reception to the speech was mild compared to the first event of “Parents as Partners Week,” a curriculum talk Tuesday night where protesters drowned out Walcott and other officials. Tonight, parent coordinators, CEC members, and PTA members at the RSVP-only speech offered mostly polite applause and the occasional isolated grumbling.

“I don’t think he addressed any of the deep dark issues that parents are concerned about,” said Doug Stern, a member of the Community Education Council for Manhattan’s District 1.

But Stern said he was impressed with Walcott’s message about involving parents in new curriculum standards and was touched by a story Walcott told about his parents’ early death.

“I think it was touching to see that he’s not that cold,” Stern said. “I guess he’s trying to connect more with parents on that level.”

Some attendees offered a harsher critique. Santos Crespo, a local president for the DC-37 labor union, said he questioned Walcott’s pledge of support for parent coordinators when 66 of them were among 737 DC-37 employees laid off earlier this month.

“What about the parent coordinators you just laid off?” he asked. “Are the parent coordinators still going to be optional in the high schools if they’re getting all this support? … To us he has no credibility.”

Outside the Park West Educational Campus, where the event took place, about two dozen protesters, many of them parents from schools that face closure, were shut out because they had not signed up to attend.

The spacious auditorium was only sparsely filled. About 650 parents had registered to attend, according to a DOE spokesman, but many did not show up. Hundreds of seats were available.

That was of little consequence to about a dozen DOE officials and school safety agents who stood outside and turned away the protesters. They couldn’t come in, the officials said, because the event was not open to the public.

“Let us in,” said Sherry Dorwish, a parent from P.S. 256 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which could face closure. She was among several parents with signs who did not sign up but waited for about an hour outside. “There’s only a handful of parents out here. If there are empty seats in there, why not let us in?”

The officials represent 24 stakeholder organizations from around the state, including parent groups, unions, charter school advocates, and school districts. They form what’s being termed a “think tank” which is charged with coming up with a consensus of recommendations to submit to State Education Commissioner John King and Assistant Commissioner Ira Schwartz, who is overseeing the group.

The last time such a group was convened, for the teacher evaluation law passed last year, it ended in a lawsuit. According to the state teachers union, education officials rejected several key provisions proposed by a 63-member “task force” at the last minute.

The new group assigned to the NCLB waiver might not be as contentious, some members who served on both groups said. For one, state officials specifically renamed the group from a “task force” to a “think tank” — in part to remind the members of their advisory role. A spokesman for NYSED said King and Schwartz pass the task force’s recommendations – as well as their own – onto the state Board of Regents, which has final decision-making power.

In addition, the subject is less controversial. People on both sides of the education aisle agree that NCLB has created unreasonable compliance standards. Dozens of states are applying for a waiver in order to avoid breaking the law, which requires 100 percent student proficiency by 2014, and President Obama’s strict guidelines are likely to limit the topics up for debate.

The entire list of names serving on the “think tank” is below. Some of the New York City representatives include the Department of Education’s Martin Kurzweil, who designs the city progress reports, Jonah Rockoff, an economist and data maven who writes about education, and Eloise Messineo, of the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators and a former principal of the now-closed Brandeis High School.

The New York City Charter School Center, United Federation of Teachers and multiple New York City advocacy groups are also represented.

Progress report scores take into account everything from how many ninth-graders earned six credits in academic courses to the number of overage students to the relative performance of students with special needs. The city’s spreadsheet containing the underlying data for the progress reports runs to more than 200 columns.

We sorted and re-sorted the spreadsheet to look at the city’s measures of school quality in different ways. Here are some of the most interesting things we found.

The top five highest-scoring schools include three schools for new immigrants (marked with asterisks):

Brooklyn International High School (Brooklyn)*
Manhattan Village Academy (Manhattan)
It Takes A Village Academy (Brooklyn)*
Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design (Brooklyn)
Manhattan Bridges High School (Manhattan)*

The top five lowest-scoring schools:

Manhattan Theatre Lab High School (Manhattan)
High School of Graphic Communication Arts (Manhattan)
Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School (Bronx)
Herbert H. Lehman High School (Bronx)
Freedom Academy High School (Brooklyn)

Seven schools didn’t get progress reports after their data raised red flags with department officials:

Theatre Arts Production Company (Bronx)
PULSE (Bronx)
School for International Studies (Brooklyn)
Bronx Aerospace (Bronx)
Bushwick School for Social Justice (Brooklyn)
Foundations Academy (Brooklyn)
FDNY School for Fire & Life Safety (Brooklyn)

Other schools where academic and management improprieties have been reported did get progress reports:

Science Skills High School (Brooklyn) got an A
A. Philip Randolph High School (Manhattan) got a C
Lehman High School (Bronx) got an F
Washington Irving High School (Manhattan) got an F
Independence High School (Manhattan) got a C
Williamsburg Charter High School (Brooklyn) got a C

Three schools benefited from the new rule that prevented schools with high graduation rates from scoring lower than a C:

Bronx Prep Charter School (Bronx)
Frederick Douglass Academy (Manhattan)
East New York Family Academy (Brooklyn)

Seventy schools sent less than a third of their graduates to college. Of those, seven got A’s:

Fordham High School of the Arts (Bronx)
High School for Violin and Dance (Bronx)
Millennium Art Academy (Bronx)
International Community High School (Bronx)
El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (Brooklyn)
International High School at Prospect Heights (Brooklyn)
W. H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School (Brooklyn)

At four schools, all selective, not a single graduate would need remediation at CUNY colleges:

Staten Island Technical High School
Townsend Harris High School
High School of American Studies at Lehman College
Queens High School for Sciences at York College

And at six schools, not a single graduate met CUNY’s basic standards:

Performance Conservatory High School (Bronx) is closing
Juan Morel Campos Secondary School (Brooklyn), which got a C
Bronxwood Preparatory Academy (Bronx), which got a C
Opportunity Charter School (Manhattan), which did not receive a grade
Arts and Media Preparatory Academy (Brooklyn), which got a B
High School of Violin and Dance (Bronx), which got an A

Six of the 11 schools that began federally funded “transformation” last year saw no change. Two saw their grades fall:

Queens Vocational and Technical High School, which went from an A to a B
Flushing High School, which went from a C to a D

And one saw a spectacular climb:

School for Global Studies, which went from an F to a B

Two of the schools we followed in “The Big Fix” series boosted their grades:

William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School went from a D to a B.
Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School rose from a C to a B.

And one school had no chance:

Christopher Columbus High School got no grade because it has started phasing out.

Seven charter high schools got progress report grades:

New Heights Charter School, which got a A for the second year in a row
International Leadership Charter School, which dropped from an A to C
Renaissance Charter School, which got a B in its first year with a report
Harlem Village Academy, which got a B in its first year with a report
John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy, which fell from an A to a B
Williamsburg Charter High School, which improved from a D to a C
Bronx Prep, which got a C for the second year in a row

Ninety-two schools did not get progress report grades because they are less than four years old or are phasing out.