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Charter sector report delayed weeks while schools verify data

Last week, I reported that the city’s charter school sector was on the verge of releasing a trove of data about its schools. I began my reporting after I learned about the plan in February, and a week ago, I learned that the organization in charge of the report had big plans for the report’s release.

The organization, the New York City Charter School Center, sent an advisory a week ago announcing Monday as the big day and inviting reporters to an 11 a.m. press conference to learn about the report, which would compile data about the schools’ performance and their students. But those plans were scrapped over the weekend.

On Sunday afternoon a spokeswoman for the charter school center emailed to say that the “State of the Sector” report was being delayed because all of the data had not been verified.

Now, four days after the promised release, the report is still not out. The spokeswoman, Kerri Lyon, said the report would now come “within a few weeks” and that the center would release the overview report at the same time as it publishes individual school-level data online.

The delay is a surprise because a 12-person committee made up of charter school operators led by the center’s policy director, Michael Regnier, was already charged with verifying the data in the report. Lyon said Thursday that charter schools were now validating some of the data about their own schools before the report’s release.

Initially, the charter center, which supports and advocates on behalf of the city’s 136 charter schools, wanted to release findings on the steps of City Hall, a spokeswoman told me earlier in the week. By last week, that plan had been scaled back to a press conference at the center’s midtown office.

I reported that some of the data set for release could make the charter school sector uncomfortable. Alongside the test scores that the sector frequently cites to promote the schools, the report was to include data points often used to criticize the schools, such as student demographic information and student and teacher attrition rates.

But the report could hardly have come as a shock to the charter schools. A lunch meeting in February when KIPP CEO Richard Barth discussed the value of data transparency drew representatives from a wide swath of city charter schools, including most of the major networks that operate multiple schools.

The data being released are already publicly available but are spread out across several different sources that collect school information. For instance, while the city Department of Education posts information about charter schools’ test scores and graduation rates, data about student demographics are found only in reports published intermittently by the charter schools’ authorizers.
  • ASTRAKA

    Geof, I smell something here……………………

    Please, keep digging for the sake of our children, our Public Education, and our communities. If you don’t do it, nobody else will!

  • Tim

    Sorry for the quibble (for the millionth time): the student demographic data for charters IS publicly available (except for special ed break-down), but it is 1-2 years old, whereas data is instantly available for any NYC traditional district school. And although the data on NYSED report cards is reported by the schools themselves, and the schools have the opportunity to both amend and re-verify their own numbers, some schools have claimed the state’s numbers are wrong. How can this be? 

    It’ll be interesting to compare future state report cards to the information contained in this report–whenever it comes out, fully verified.  

  • Michael M. (parent still)

    Wow.  Traditional public school teachers’ reports get dumped, bugs and all.  But charters hold the cards until the reports are debugged (scrubbed?) and the public outcry dies down.

    Sheesh.

  • somethingamiss?

    So the charters have found their data lacking so what! Publish it now without revisions explanations or changes- just as the public schools have.

  • somethingamiss?

    Could it be that releasing the data will show replacing public schools with charters has been Exactly the wrong thing to do? Will it stop turnaround and colocations dead in their tracks? TIME TO DEMAND THE DATA!!!

  • I noticed that…

    How do the charter schools sector cook the books without getting burned?
    1.  They hide the data in the hopes that the media will not ask.
    2.  If the media does ask, they create a diversion by coming up with a media-attention announcement when the data will be released.
    3.  As the public waits for the data to be released, the charters, the hedge-fund managers and the DoE have meetings to discuss what can be released and what should not be released.
    4.  They bring in people known for manipulating the data, fudging the numbers, and experts in scrubbing the facts.
    5.  Then the charters release the data, displaying the most impressive fictitious report of “success” in their schools that the students and parents of Lake Wobegon would love to attend.

    Cooking the books is not so hard. 

  • Anon

    Public school principals also have the opportunity to review and validate their school data before it is published. Our school has caught data entry errors more than once.

  • EdintheApple

    It is commonplace for the organization that is sponsoring the report has the final edit … clearing an internal communication snarl … none of this data is new … the “new” data is the
    State Ed data on register discharges from charter schools as well as suspensions/expulsions …

  • I noticed that…

    please provide the links so others can see for themselves the info.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002397245457 Mary Conway-Spiegel

    Indeed…incomplete sloppiness is acc

  • Ellen

    “The data being released are already publicly available but are spread
    out across several different sources that collect school information. ”
    Hide and seek….only now it’s hide and wait to seek.  The hope is that interest will die down.  How sad.
    What’s so sad is that no matter what is released now, there will be suspicions all around.  Who’s going to believe the data?

  • Ellen

    “The data being released are already publicly available but are spread
    out across several different sources that collect school information. ”
    Hide and seek….only now it’s hide and wait to seek.  The hope is that interest will die down.  How sad.
    What’s so sad is that no matter what is released now, there will be suspicions all around.  Who’s going to believe the data?

  • bee

    So when will this data be readily available?

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