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In an education department that’s driven by data, what gets measured is a clear expression of values.

So this year’s elementary and middle school progress reports signal that the city is serious about integrating disabled students into regular classes, helping minority boys, and quickly getting immigrant students learning in English.

The broad contours of what we’ll see later today when the Department of Education releases the newest progress reports, based on the last school year, have been clear for months. Back in the spring, the DOE told principals that it would not insulate schools against steep score drops as it did last year, so we know that more schools will get failing grades that put them at risk of closure.

In fact, the department set a fixed distribution of scores: 25 percent of schools will get As, 35 percent Bs, 30 percent Cs, 7 percent Ds, and 3 percent Fs. Last year, just 5 percent of schools were awarded D or F grades.

We also know each school’s state test scores, announced last month. While high or low average scores don’t always equate to high or low progress report grades, because the reports are based mostly on the test scores, they often do. (The department is also guaranteeing that schools with test scores in the top third citywide get no lower than a C; last year, only schools in the top quarter got that promise.) Also, because fewer schools registered large test score gains or losses this year, progress report grades are likely to be relatively stable.

That means that the biggest changes could come as the result of the department’s annual tinkering with the reports’ formula. (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…)

An essential piece of the state’s Race to the Top plans is in limbo after State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli shot down a controversial contract.

On Friday, DiNapoli rejected a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to build a statewide “Education Data Portal” that would have allowed schools and teachers to track and use student performance data.

State teachers unions and advocates had protested the contract because it was offered without competitive bidding and because Wireless Generation’s parent company, News Corporation, is embroiled in controversy over illegal wiretapping conducted by some of its publications. DiNapoli cited both concerns in his letter to the State Education Department turning down the contract.

The rejection marks yet another setback in the state’s school reform plans. Last week, a judge ruled that the state should not be allowed to use student test scores to count for 40 percent of teachers’ evaluations, bringing to a standstill a centerpiece of New York’s Race to the Top plans. Now the data clearinghouse that would make the evaluations possible is also at risk. (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…)

Nearly two thirds of principals say the Department of Education’s $81 million online data warehouse could help improve teaching and learning at their schools. 

The finding is among the results of a survey conducted by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum’s office, which released a statement today emphasizing that more than a third of principals did not think the system was helping their schools. In its coverage of Gotbaum’s report, the New York Times billed the system as being “supported by most principals,” And the city has said that its internal survey results show that most principals see benefits to the system.

ARIS’s solid approval rating doesn’t mean all of its kinks have been worked out. The Manhattan School for Children’s parent coordinator sent the following e-mail to parents last week:

ARIS and Classroom Assignments
It has come to my attention that the classroom teacher assignments have been posted on ARIS and I have been trying to unravel the mystery as to how these assignments came to be posted. I have also discovered that there are many mistakes. The official letters from MSC will be sent at the end of August. I am also out of town and cannot access the ID numbers that many parents are now requesting. Please double check the letters that you received from your classroom teacher. Both numbers were given out at the same time. Again, you will be notified about your official class by mail. Please do not rely on the ARIS site for this information.

The parent who forwarded me the e-mail said the incorrect information has been removed from the system but new information hasn’t yet been uploaded. (The system opened to parents in May.) (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.

One thing that went under the radar during the nonstop news cycle of the last few weeks is a sizable data dump from the Department of Education, which for the first time released statistical reports about the 11 organizations that support the city’s schools.

The reports went online last week to inaugurate the period when schools can choose which organization they want to affiliate with. The organizations, called School Support Organizations, or SSOs, have provided support services to individual schools for the last two years in place of the traditional school-district bureaucracy. This is the first time that the DOE has allowed schools to change the affiliation they originally selected back in 2007.

The new reports include a chart (above) comparing the SSOs according to their schools’ progress report scores, quality review evaluations, and principal satisfaction survey results. The result is the public evaluation that Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer who formerly ran the Empowerment organization, said back in January was being cooked up the department’s accountability office. The comparison, which takes into account school data from the 2007-2008 school year, shows that the SSO run by the City University of New York did the best, followed closely by the Empowerment organization.

The reports are available on the DOE’s Web site only in PDF format, and there is a different one for each organization. A DOE spokeswoman told me that the department had not made available a database compiling the data, so I went ahead and made one, available here or after the jump. I also went one step further and added some calculations of my own, based on the DOE’s data: The percent change in progress report and quality review scores from 2007 to 2008.

Among my first impressions: Schools either improved their internal operations significantly between 2007 and 2008, or else they figured out how to look like they had improved, because the percentage of schools receiving top ratings on their Quality Reviews jumped in every organization.

If you have more statistics knowhow than I do and some extra time on your hands (like during this school vacation), take a look and note what you see. Leave your observations in the comments. (more…)

Class sizes and student-to-teacher ratios went up this year, especially in the elementary school grades, according to data the Department of Education released today. This is the first time the Department of Education has reported an increase in class sizes since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002.

School officials blamed the economy for the rising figures, which come despite millions of dollars poured into class-size reduction over the last year. In a release, officials said budget cuts have prohibited some principals from hiring new teachers.

The data show that classes are slightly less crowded than a preliminary data set released to the City Council late last year suggested, but still more crowded than they were last school year. The average third-grade class, for instance, now has almost 22 students, up from 21 last school year. The biggest increases in class size came between kindergarten and fourth grade, where research is clearest about the benefits of reduced class sizes.

The average class size in high school is also up, to 26.2 from 26.1 last year. The department’s presentation argues that the change is due to a new form of reporting. Some classes with more than one teacher in a single room used to be treated as two separate classes, but this year the department counted them as one. Under the old form of reporting, the average high school class size would have dropped to 25.6, school officials said.

The rising class sizes come against a backdrop of big investments by the state into reducing class size. The DOE, in its release, says that schools where reducing class size was a high priority have seen lowered figures.

We’re still working on a deeper analysis. While we do that, please feel free to peruse the release — and send us tips for questions to ask.

The online testing system's logo.

Here’s an unusual complaint from a Bedford Stuyvesant elementary school, about the city’s online testing system called Acuity. Acuity gives tests to students throughout the year and lets teachers and parents monitor how they do — what subjects the children are doing well in and which they aren’t.

Usually, critics complain that Acuity, which the Department of Education has purchased from the CTB McGraw Hill company, is a waste of money that encourages children to be over-tested.

But the complaint in Bed-Stuy, from Lisa North, a literacy coach at P.S. 3, is that Acuity isn’t available enough. North’s argument is that since the statewide English exam is scheduled for next month, the holiday break should be a natural time for parents to help students prepare for the test, which can determine whether a child is promoted to the next grade. But North says family prep time will be hampered because Acuity is scheduled to shut down over the holidays, from December 28th to January 4th. (more…)