GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• With startups, investors, and industry, New York City is emerging as an ed-tech hub. (On Innovation)
• Stanford researchers found that charter schools in Newark are outperforming district schools. (CREDO)
• There might be a value in tallying schools’ performance and progress, but why do it together? (Shanker)
• A teacher describes his students’ many shocked reactions to seeing that he shaved his hair. (Mr. Foteah)
• A Common Core advocate worries about the backlash against the nonfiction requirement. (Flypaper)
• A parent, concerned about a school’s low progress report grade, is told to stop worrying. (Insideschools)
• Students at schools that have had low and high scores say the grades don’t reflect reality. (SchoolBook)
• A new method for comparing graduation rates nationally finds a wide range among states. (Politics K-12)
• The U.S. DOE named 61 finalists for Race to the Top-District, include New York City. (District Dossier)
• The RTTT-D finalists include groups of charter schools and consortia of small districts. (Answer Sheet)

Work of Art: NYC teachers show off student work aligned to new learning standards

Instead of drawings, paintings or sculptures, GothamSchools’ makeshift art gallery Monday night featured student essays about wolves, personal conflict, and classic fiction dotted the walls.

Middle and high school teachers from across the city brought the work to the Upper East Side to put on display during “The Art of Teaching and Learning to the Common Core,” an event we held with the support of Teaching Matters and Azure. (more…)

As any teacher or student can attest, there’s only so much that a letter grade can tell you about the person who earned it, even if it’s an A.

That’s even more true for the city’s progress report grades, released for the 2011-2012 school year on Monday. Schools get a single letter grade after the Department of Education crunches hundreds of data points, using complex algorithms to measure the schools against each other in addition to absolute standards. The department has a small fleet of officials generating the annual grades, and the spreadsheet containing the underlying data for this year’s scores stretched to 240 columns.

We sorted and re-sorted the spreadsheet to look at some of the city’s many measures of school quality in different ways. Here are a few of the most interesting things we found — and leave a comment to share your data-driven observations.

Four of the top five highest-scoring schools also made the top five last year (marked with an asterisk):

It Takes A Village Academy (Brooklyn)*
Manhattan Village Academy (Manhattan)*
Academy for Careers and Television in Film (Queens)
Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design (Brooklyn)*
Brooklyn International High School (Brooklyn)*

Four of the five lowest-scoring schools are in Manhattan:

Academy for Social Action: A College Board School (Manhattan)
Choir Academy of Harlem (Manhattan)
Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School (Manhattan)
Boys and Girls High School (Brooklyn)
High School of Graphic Communication Arts (Manhattan)

At 49 schools, less than 5 percent of 2008′s ninth-graders graduated this year ready for college. Of them, six got A’s: (more…)

Brooklyn's School for International Studies is among the schools under investigation over its 2010-2011 progress report data.

Last year, the Department of Education withheld progress reports from seven schools because their data raised red flags.

At the time, officials said the irregularities could have been caused by innocuous reporting errors. But they said the suspicious data could also reflect cheating. The department makes important decisions about which schools should be closed, and which principals should receive pay boosts, based on the progress reports.

Investigations were launched. And a year later, all but one of the schools have new progress reports, released yesterday, but still don’t have their 2010-2011 reports.

At a briefing on this year’s progress report release, department officials said those investigations are still unresolved, and they’re opening up a new one at a Bronx high school accused of fudging its numbers.

“The goal of the investigation is to get it right,” Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said, explaining why the investigators have so far taken more than a year to look into the irregularities. “We’re going to take the time we need to get it right.” (more…)

• The city gave slightly higher grades to high schools this year. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, Post, NY1)
• The college-readiness rate rose slightly but is still below 30 percent, according to city data. (Daily News)
• The city shortlisted 23 high schools for possible closure based on the grades. (GothamSchools, WSJ)
• At the top school, It Takes A Village Academy, 11.3 percent of students graduate college-ready. (Post)
• DeWitt Clinton HS, one of few remaining large high schools in the Bronx, got its second straight F. (Post)
• The principal of another school with two F’s, Boys and Girls HS, says he’s not at fault. (GothamSchools)
• EBC HS for Public Service posted one of the biggest gains, and students credit the new principal. (Post)
• City officials said they might make it harder for schools to earn top grades next year. (GothamSchools)
• Eric Nadelstern: Next, the city should rate schools by graduates’ performance in college. (Daily News)
• P.S./M.S. 114 in Belle Harbor is one of two schools shut since Sandy to reopen today. (Times, NY1)
• The Archdiocese of New York said 27 Catholic schools could close for financial reasons. (Daily News)
• A former Memphis school official was indicted for running a teacher-certification cheating ring. (Times)
• St. Louis’s schools regained provisional accreditation after making slow but steady gains for years. (WSJ)
• A former N.J. schools official says Newark’s new contract is exciting — and high-stakes. (Daily News)