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When the Department of Education’s embargo of Teacher Data Reports details lifted at noon today, news organizations across the city rushed to make the data available.

The Teacher Data Reports are “value-added” assessments of teachers’ effectiveness that were produced from 2008 to 2010 for reading and math teachers in grades 3 to 8.

This morning, department officials including Chancellor Dennis Walcott and Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky met with reporters to offer caution about how the data reports should be used. They emphasized the reports’ wide margins of error — 35 percentage points for math teachers and 53 percentage points for reading teachers, on average — and that the reports reflect only a small portion of teachers’ work.

“We would never advise anyone — parent, reporter, principal, teacher — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,” Polakow-Suransky said.

Most of the news organizations that filed Freedom of Information Law requests for the ratings plan to publish them in searchable or streamlined databases, with the teachers’ names attached. GothamSchools does not plan to publish the data with teachers’ names or identifying characteristics included because of concerns about the data’s reliability.

At least two other news organizations that cover education are also not publishing the data: the local affiliate of Fox News, according to a representative of Fox, and the nonprofit school information website Insideschools.

Department officials are asking schools not to release the reports to parents. They issued a guide today advising principals about how to handle parents who demand that their child be removed from the class of a teacher rated ineffective. (more…)

Of nearly 600 students who were enrolled in four high schools that closed their doors last year, less than half graduated and at least 22 percent left the school system without a diploma.

The information is contained in trove of data the Department of Education released today, in accordance with a recent City Council mandate, about the students who remained in 15 schools during their final year of operation last year. In addition to the four high schools, the city closed six middle schools, three elementary schools, and two primary schools last year. Together, those schools enrolled 1,994 students, ranging from just 54 at a Manhattan middle school to 358 at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn.

The council imposed the reporting requirement amid criticism that students affected by school closures drop out at a disproportionately higher rate as a result. At the high schools that closed last year, the dropout rate was indeed high, at 22.1 percent. A state audit last year put the city’s dropout rate at 10 percent.

But a high dropout rate could be expected — after all, the remaining students were those who had straggled at some of the lowest-performing schools in the city and had stayed there after other students had sought transfer to other schools. The students might well have dropped out even if their school stayed open.

More interesting, some say, are questions the data do not answer. (more…)

Principals and superintendents suspended a disproportionally high number of black and special needs students last year, according to data the Department of Education released today to comply with a new law.

Of the 73,441 suspensions in the 2010-2011 school year, more than 50 percent were black and thirty percent had individualized education plans, according to the data. In contrast, black students make up 33 percent of city enrollment and students requiring special education services make up 17 percent.

“These are outrageous numbers,” said Udi Ofer, Advocacy Director for New York Civil Liberties Union, a group that has closely followed suspension data for more than a decade. “It shows a policy and practice that has a grossly disproportionate impact on black and special needs children.”

It is the first time that the DOE is providing disaggregated data about student suspensions to the public under the Student Safety Act, which City Council passed last year after years of lobbying by NYCLU and other advocacy groups. In previous years, the DOE has only been required to release overall suspensions under state law. (more…)

Two years after becoming the Department of Education’s official data monitor, the city’s Independent Budget Office has finished crunching a mountain of numbers.

The results, which include revelations about space-sharing arrangements, budget allocations, principal and teacher demographics, and student performance, are compiled in a comprehensive report released today.

The IBO received the data dump after state legislators designated the office as a DOE watchdog scrutinizing student achievement and financial information in the 2009 law reauthorizing mayoral control. Since then, the IBO’s education unit has grown to eight people from “basically one,” according to communications director Doug Turetsky. Raymond Damonico, the IBO’s director of education research, supervised the report’s creation.

The IBO also today launched a website that allows users to pull up the data for any city school. (Charter schools are not included in the analysis.)

Among the many highlights:

• Poor students at relatively affluent schools outperformed relatively affluent students at schools with many poor students.
• As of 2009-2010, school buildings housing co-locations were less crowded overall than buildings housing a single school. (more…)

Click on the image to go straight to the new data below.

When the state and city education officials released the 2010-2011 ELA and Math test data on Monday, they didn’t make it easy for interested New Yorkers to make sense of the scores.

One spreadsheet, released by the city Department of Education, left off school names and corresponded results only by school code. It also excluded public charter schools entirely. The state’s spreadsheet included names, but listed every other public school in New York State as well.

There was also no easy way to compare schools to one another. The city included a comparison against previous years’ scores, but the file didn’t allow users to compare change over time among schools. The state’s data didn’t include any previous scores at all.

Not surprisingly, many of our readers emailed us to express their frustration over the scattered and unwieldy data. When I asked a DOE spokesman Matthew Mittenthal about it, he told me that grouping the data into school-by-school comparisons wasn’t a priority when publishing the information.

“We would never use test scores alone for accountability purposes, so we don’t actively encourage people to compare one school to another on that basis,” Mittenthal wrote in an email.

We spent the past couple of days playing with the spreadsheets so that it’s easier and more intuitive. First, we corresponded codes used by the DOE to actual school names (for example, 15K447 = The Math & Science Exploratory School). Then, we stripped non-essential data and added last year’s test results as a column header. Finally, we filtered the schools by performance so the best-scoring are at the top. (more…)

The Department of Education official charged with creating schools’ progress reports said today that parents should look beyond the capitalized, bold-faced grades on the reports and analyze the schools’ data.

“We want parents to get more involved at looking at all the information behind the overall grade,” said Deputy Chancellor for Accountability Shael Suransky. He also said that this year’s reports for elementary and middle schools are the “most accurate” the city has ever produced.

As parents and principals figure out what to make of the new ratings, here are some highlights culled from the data:

• Because the DOE gave schools extra credit if they were especially successful with special education students and students who aren’t fluent in English, two schools scored over 100 points. Chancellor Klein visited one of the schools — P.S. 172 Beacon School in Sunset Park — as part of his back-to-school tour. The other school, P.S. 32 Belmont in the Bronx, received more extra credit points (15 in total) than any other school in the city. Last year, nearly 50 schools got more than 100 points.

(more…)

Rhetoric around the city’s excessed teachers has cooled off since last year, but the issue hasn’t disappeared. More than 1,700 teachers remain on the city’s payroll without full-time teaching positions, officials said today.

Teachers enter the so-called Absent Teacher Reserve pool when they lose their jobs to budget cuts or school closures. At the ATR pool’s height this summer, nearly 3,000 teachers were in excess. Just over 40 percent of those teachers either found jobs, retired, resigned or went on leave, leaving 1,779 still without positions.

That’s roughly the same number who lacked teaching jobs at this time last year. DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said that there are currently just over 1,200 vacancies in the city’s schools, around 100 fewer open positions than there were just after the start of school last year.

Principals are currently only allowed to hire teachers already on the city’s payroll, except in certain areas like special education, science and some foreign languages. Earlier this summer, the city also relaxed its hiring restrictions for schools in the Bronx that were having trouble filling their open positions. (more…)

When test scores are released, individual schools often get lost in the big picture. To pull some out of the heap, I’ve created a way to look at each school’s results in a broad stroke: For every school in the city, I averaged the percentage of students who scored proficient across all the tested grade levels.

The following lists rank the highest- and lowest-scoring elementary schools in the city overall. It includes no charter schools and no screened schools. I did include schools with gifted and talented programs; they are denoted with a * next to their name.

Middle schools will come tomorrow. (And Kim Gittleson has done a similar analysis of charter schools; check it out.)

UPDATE: Three of these lists have been revised to add four schools missing from our lists due to an Excel error. The four added schools are:

• PS/IS 116 Wiliam C. Hughley, with 23.6% average proficiency on math, should have been on the math low-scoring list.
• P.S. 172 Beacon School of Excellence, with 99.6% average proficiency on math, should have been on the math high-scoring list.
• P.S. 172 Beacon School of Excellence, with 95.1% average proficiency on reading, should have been on that high-scoring list.
• P.S. 158 Bayard Taylor, with 90.5% average proficiency on reading, should have been on that high-scoring list.

Schools that would have been bumped off the lists because of these additions have been kept on.

(more…)

The percentage of minority students in the city’s gifted and talented kindergarten classes increased this school year from last, according to data the Department of Education released today.

But while the percentages of Hispanic, Asian and multi-racial students all increased, the ratio of black students to the whole class declined by just over one percentage point. (more…)

Test results from Harlem's KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School, where students on average outperformed their district but not always the state. Graph from 2008 KIPP annual report.

Critics of KIPP charter schools have accused the national charter school chain of being opaque about how much money it spends and what kinds of students it serves. But KIPP says it’s committed to transparency, and so every year it releases a comprehensive report about its fundraising and planning efforts, and about how each of its schools is performing. The report about 2008 just went online today.

The report covers some familiar data points about how students at the city’s four KIPP schools are outperforming students at other schools in their districts on state tests. But it also includes the less often publicized fact that not all KIPP schools in New York always beat state test averages.

And while KIPP’s New York City schools have recently been at the center of a renewed battle over teachers unions in charter schools, the report card doesn’t get into politics, instead providing an overview of KIPP’s plans for growth and profiles of each of the organization’s 66 schools across the country. The profiles include pictures of each school leader, the demographic breakdown of students, per-pupil funding figures, and state reading and math test results. The section about the city’s KIPP schools begins on page 84.

Also of interest, particularly if you’ve been following along with Ken Hirsh’s hunt for financial information about charter schools, is the list of foundations and individuals that gave to KIPP during the 2007-2008 school year, broken down by gift size. You can find that at the very end of the report.