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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…)

Via Edwize, second grade reading teacher Miss Brave explains why she has to record her students’ assessment data all over again:

This morning we had a meeting at which we were told we would have to re-enter each student’s individual results onto a class summary sheet. Had we, in fact, already done this? Yes! But when we asked what happened to the last summary sheet, we were dismissed with a curt, “I don’t know.”

Um… So, okay, let’s review. As part of my job, I did the following:

• Administered the assessment to each individual student.
• Graded the assessment of each individual student.
• Entered the assessment of each individual student onto a class composite summary sheet.
• Handed off the data to people who are supposed to be in charge of entering it into the computer.

And those people, as part of their jobs, did the following:

• Lost my data.

In my last post I raised the possibility that, if ARIS data is flawed, the city records that ARIS is built on could also be flawed. A reader just e-mailed in this response:

Agreed that this could be a big concern – but wouldn’t it be great to get out there that having the data easily accessible to teachers – which has not been the case — is an opportunity for schools to fix that and give teachers the accurate data that they need to provide students with effective instruction?   Not on the scale of sweeping social change, but a huge step toward school improvement, no?  What’s the alternative – we give up on data entirely?  Start over, but without the historical data for kids already in the system?

The ARIS logo.

The support organization New Visions for Public Schools is backing away from warnings it made last week about a new Department of Education data warehouse. The group had told principals not to rely on the accuracy of the data in the system, which is called ARIS. But in an e-mail sent to principals today, New Visions said that it had “overstated” those concerns:

We previously sent out our weekly eblast with language which overstated issues of data accuracy in the ARIS system. We continue to support school’s use of this powerful resource for using data to analyze and improve student achievement.  Our discussions with the ARIS team have confirmed that all of the system issues of which we were aware have been addressed.

The reversal shifts the picture about what exactly is going on with ARIS, an ambitious project that aims to collect databases on students that had been dispersed and hard to access into a single accessible online location. (more…)

Middle school English teacher Ms. Malarkey shares her real-life experience with the city’s data management tools:

I’ve been a good little soldier and have been attempting to use more data. Of course, it took me about three weeks to be able to log on to Acuity. No one could figure out why, but then I realized that my old DOE e-mail account is somehow lost in cyberspace, replaced with a newer one I had no idea about with both my maiden and married names. In the meantime, I still haven’t been able to log on to ARIS.

Bureaucratizing a good idea can defeat the purpose, says the teacher who blogs at Have a Gneiss Day:

We are being absolutely killed with paperwork. Case in point: the kids must write goals for themselves for each marking period. Now, I think it is a good idea for children to reflect upon their strengths and weaknesses, and figure out ways they can improve their grades. However- not only do we have to conference with the kids about their goals, review the goals with them, sign off on the goals, collect the goal sheets, verify that parents have signed the goals, organize the goals- we have to attach evidence that they are meeting their goals. … Days are being wasted that could be used on valuable instruction and completing activities to reinforce new concepts. I’m growing stacks and mounds and piles of papers that need to somehow be organized into some sort of meaningful log so that if “they” come, I can show how I wasted hours of class time….

Who is the “they” for whom her school is gathering all this evidence of goal-setting?

Every New York City school is now subject to a yearly Quality Review by a team who visits for a day or two and looks for evidence of certain practices laid out in a school quality rubric. So her school has to show the reviewers that each of their teachers has been setting and monitoring goals with the students:

Click graphic to enlarge.

Illustration by Bob Dahm for EdWeek.

Miss G. is blogging again with brief dispatches from long, long days in her new school. As hard as she’s working, she’s much happier:

Our kids took school made standardized tests in both reading and math last week and we spent all of today (7:15 – 6) analyzing the data in grades and as a school. We made data driven plans, formed intervention groups, and talked about trends we were noticing and how to continue the great ones and stop the not so great ones.
Tomorrow is data day 2 – more planning and looking at numbers and standards and tests and discussing these tests that we now all have memorized.
And this is reason #131 why I came to this school. This is great instruction.
My old school has most of this stuff on file, too – the only difference is that most of it is contrived for the purpose of the quality review and then never used – by anyone. Here, it’s used – breathed.

Her previous experience of data being available but not well-used may be the more common. According to EdWeek, a new report from the US Department of Education shows that most teachers now have access to student performance data, but far fewer have access to recent data or training in how to use it well. And very few have time during school or paid professional development hours to look at data and really use it to plan. “[T]eachers in the study were more likely to use data to inform parents about how individual students were doing than to help guide curriculum changes or identify effective instructional practices,” EdWeek reports.

Is data for show only, integrated into planning, or somewhere in between at your school? What kind of professional development have you participated in on this topic? Has the push to collect more data and use it to improve instruction changed your teaching practice?

In the wake of this week’s release of school progress reports, many parents, educators, and policymakers around New York City are asking how to meaningfully assess schools. How much should a parents take a school’s grade into account when deciding where to send their children? What does it mean if a school’s grade rose dramatically or dropped precipitously from last year to this? Do the progress reports provide a complete picture of the work of a school?

In a well-timed coincidence, the National School Board Association’s (NSBA) BoardBuzz points us to two additional resources for figuring out how schools are doing. (more…)

The graduation rate of students with disabilities continues to be a dark spot on the school completion picture in New York State. Statewide, only 5 percent of students with disabilities earn a Regents diploma in four years, and in New York City, only 20 percent of students with disabilities graduate in four years with a Regents or local diploma, according to the data the state released yesterday.

Also alarming is the proportion of students with disabilities statewide who are included in the 4-year cohort data as receiving an IEP diploma: 12 percent. (more…)