GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Last week, the New York State Senate passed a bill that would increase the number of charter schools in New York from 200 to 460. Included in the bill was a provision that charter schools increase efforts to enroll students with learning disabilities — an attempt to appease critics who claim that charters significantly under-enroll students with disabilities.

Yet an examination of data provided to me by the city shows that while charters enroll fewer students with disabilities, the gap is not as large as initially reported by the state teachers union, known as NYSUT. According to Department of Education data, 13 percent of charter school students have an Individualized Education Plan, indicating that they have special needs, compared to 15 percent at traditional public schools. NYSUT reported the numbers as being 9.4 percent at charter schools and 16.4 percent at district schools.

The discrepancy stems from problematic data NYSUT received from the state education department. According to the state, the number of students with disabilities that a charter school reports enrolling often does not match up with numbers reported by school districts. As a result, the state does not consider its own data to be reliable.

As an alternative, I used a database known as CAPS, which is compiled by the city’s Committee on Special Education. CAPS includes information about every student in the city who has an IEP, so it provides a more accurate breakdown of the number of special education students at each school.

I found that the percentage of charter schools enrolling as many or more students with disabilities than their traditional public school counterparts increased from a quarter of schools last year to almost a third of schools this year. (more…)

This is the second post in a series that looks at data from charter schools’ Basic Education Data System reports. This data was provided to us by the New York State Education Department via a Freedom of Information Law request. A full spreadsheet with the data we used is available here.

On Tuesday, the state teachers union released a report that said that charters in New York State had a student turnover rate of 8 to 10 percent each year. While statistics on overall turnover rates are hard to come by, data that city charter schools file with the state shows that one measure of transfer rate for city charter schools — that is, the number of students that transfer out of a charter school during the school year — is 6 percent. To be clear, this necessarily leaves out of the number of students who finished the school year but did not decide to return the following year.

Overall, the rate of transfers decreased slightly from 7 percent in 2007-2008 to 6 percent in 2008-2009. Generally, the longer a school has been in existence, the lower its transfer rate. For instance, the NYC Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industries had the highest transfer rate — 26 percent  — in 2008-2009, but it had only been open for one year. Achievement First Endeavor and Ross Global Institute had the highest rates in 2007-2008, 23 percent and 24 percent respectively. By 2008-2009, these numbers decreased to 15 percent at each school — numbers that are still higher than average. Some schools, such as Achievement First Crown Heights, Achievement First East New York, Community Partnership Charter School, KIPP Academy, and the South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts, reported no transfers during both the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 school years.

To look at the transfer rates at individual charter schools, you can scroll down the list below. (more…)

This is the first post in a series that looks at data from charter schools’ Basic Education Data System (BEDS) reports. This data was provided to us by the New York State Education Department via a Freedom of Information Law request. A full spreadsheet with the data we used is available here.

One of the largest issues in the charter school debates has been accusations that charters “counsel out” students who have learning disabilities or who do not adhere to the schools’ strict codes of conduct. While we haven’t found comprehensive statistics that track individual students enrolled in charter schools from year to year, the BEDS reports include a “student stability” number that is relevant to this issue.

Student stability counts the number of students who are currently enrolled in the highest grade that the charter serves who were also enrolled in the school last year. For instance, if a charter school serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade, the student stability number would look at the number of current eighth-graders who were also seventh-graders last year.

We found that, on average, charter schools retain 84% of their students, compared to 93 percent for traditional public schools citywide. (The stability rate for traditional public schools varies from district to district, with a 91 percent stability rate in District 5, for instance.) This percentage has remained constant for the past three years but the percentage at individual schools varies widely. Some schools, such as the Beginning with Children Charter School and the Harbor Sciences and Arts Charter School, experience almost no attrition. Others, such as Harlem Day Charter School and the John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy, consistently lose more than one third of their class. And for many charter schools whose highest grade was ninth, the attrition was noticeably high, probably because many of their eighth-graders chose to go to other, perhaps more well-known, high schools.

To better visualize the data, we have created a map that shows all of the charter schools that had applicable data. (more…)

Yesterday, the Post published an article exposing a principal at PS 38 who tried to pressure her staff into giving her a good review on the annual Learning Environment Survey. This prompted Joel Klein to respond that he doubted teachers bowed to principal pressure since the surveys are anonymous. To investigate how teachers rated their principals, we looked at responses to four questions from last year’s Learning Environment Survey:

1. How much do you agree/disagree? The principal places the learning needs of children above other interests.
2. How much do you agree/disagree? The principal is an effective manager who makes the school run smoothly.
3. How much do you agree/disagree? I trust the principal at his/her word.
4. To what extent do you feel supported by your principal?

We found that the majority of teachers rate their principals highly. For instance, over 85 percent of the teachers who responded to the survey agreed that their principal supported them. (more…)

Mid-April marks the beginning of the charter school lottery season, and with it, news reports of staggering numbers of applications to schools with limited slots. Already, the Post reported that 3,800 students applied for 588 spots in the Achievement First charter schools. In order to review the results for past lotteries, I submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the State Education department, who provided us with the Basic Education Data System (BEDS) data that all charters file with the state. I found that applications to charter schools have increased by 50% since 2007, with over 50,000 applications submitted last year. By comparison, enrollment in charters has only increased by 40% to just shy of 40,000 students last year. The chances of getting admitted to a charter school in New York City have declined from an average acceptance rate of 36% in 2008-2009 to a rate of 28% in 2009-2010. A full spreadsheet of the admissions data, with statistics for individual schools, is available here.

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Joel Klein recently announced the number of teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, including a breakdown of teachers by years of service. One common question is how these numbers compare to the overall distribution of active DOE teachers. Using information from the DOE, I found that younger teachers are underrepresented in the ATR pool at 13 percent versus 29 percent of active teachers. Teachers with 15 to 25 years of service are overrepresented in the ATR pool, at 31 percent versus 19 percent of the active teachers. The current breakdown of active teachers in the DOE as well as the breakdown of teachers in the ATR pool are shown in the pie charts below. (more…)

A longstanding selling point of the charter school movement has been budget independence — that is, schools are given the freedom to allocate resources as they see fit, relatively free from government control. We decided to explore how this freedom is affecting allocation decisions. 

We analyzed the spending breakdown, specifically as it relates to teacher salaries and classroom instruction expenditures, and found that, on average, charter schools devote 10 percent more of their budgets to teacher salaries and 14 percent more of their budgets to classroom instruction as compared to the Department of Education’s budget for traditional schools. A full spreadsheet with individual school budgets, the total DOE budget, and our calculations is available here.

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Buried on the Department of Education’s website is a page that lists per pupil spending on a school-wide, district-wide, and system-wide basis. Using this information, as well as expense data from the 2007-2008 audits and the recent Independent Budget Office report, we compared spending by charter schools and traditional public schools that are located in the same building.

We found that charter schools spent $365 less per pupil than their co-located traditional public schools in 2007-2008. You can see our calculations in a workbook here.

Some notes on our methodology:

• We looked only at the amount the co-located traditional public school spent per pupil on their general education students (which includes part-time but not full-time special education students). This is because while charter schools do enroll special needs students, very few offer all-day special education classes. For reference, we included the numbers for overall per-pupil and full-time special education spending in our database. (more…)

A recent report by the Independent Budget Office found that New York City charter schools that don’t use public space receive around $3,000 less per pupil than traditional public schools. This post reviews how much charter schools actually spend on their space.

We created a database using financial information from the 2008-2009 annual financial audits and school siting statistics from the 2008-2009 Blue Book report produced by the School Construction Authority to catalog school space. We found that the 26 schools not housed in Department of Education-provided space spent around $2,100 per pupil on occupancy costs, which includes rent, utilities, safety, and maintenance. You can see the full spreadsheet here. This database lists every charter school and whether or not it is in DOE space. As an added feature, for those in DOE space, it lists the schools with which they share space and their respective progress report scores.

This $2,100 number only tells part of the story. According to a source who helps charter schools find private space, the market average for a charter school to lease space is between $2,400 and $3,500 per pupil. If the rental costs are less than $2,000 per pupil, this probably indicates that the school negotiated a great rental deal, bought the building a long time ago and paid off most of the mortgage, or has some sort of philanthropic money subsidizing part of the cost. This is certainly the case for many of the schools in our spreadsheet, such as the Carl C. Icahn Charter School or Bronx Preparatory Academy — both schools that have some sort of philanthropic entity helping them with their rental and/or purchase needs. (more…)

A Queens charter school that pays for pension costs directly out of its budget is cutting programs to afford pensions.

Stacey Gauthier at the Renaissance Charter School is worrying a lot these days — about money. This year she’s had to increase class sizes, cut the summer school program, and forgo hiring experienced teachers when an older teacher retires. Yet she still hasn’t cut enough to be able to afford the school’s rising pension costs, which have grown from $12,000 per teacher in 2004 to $21,000 per teacher this year.

Pension costs for city teachers have been rising steadily over the past decade, but for the most part the expenses have been hidden from individual schools, which rely on the city to cover all pension costs. Yet for a small number of charters schools like Renaissance that participate in the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) out of their own budgets, the ballooning price of a comfortable retirement has been acutely felt.

“We have another year to live,” Gauthier said. “We’re dipping into our savings now, which is okay, but if things don’t rebound, we won’t be financially viable.” (more…)