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Chart from Independent Budget Office report about schools slated for closure. (Click to enlarge.)

For the third year in a row, the city’s data watchdog has concluded that the schools the city is trying to close serve especially needy students.

In 2010 and 2011, the Independent Budget Office put together longer reports about the city’s school closure proposals on the request of Robert Jackson, chair of the City Council’s education committee. But this year, the office, which has a special mandate to scrutinize the Department of Education’s facts and figures, compiled details about the demographics, performance, and funding of schools on the chopping block on its own. Then it released the statistics in an easy-to-read, stand-alone format.

Among the many people who are receiving the IBO’s 13-slide presentation by email today are the members of the Panel for Educational Policy, who are set to vote on the closure proposals tonight, according to spokesman Doug Turetsky.

“It’s an accessible format so people can see the stats and come to their own conclusions,” he said. (more…)

The city’s budget watchdog predicted less money making its way to classrooms next year, even as it said the city’s overall economic outlook could be rosier than what Mayor Bloomberg has previously suggested.

The Independent Budget Office yesterday said that rising costs for contracts, employee benefits, and charter school payments appear poised to cut into the funds that the Department of Education is free to allocate to schools. The IBO analyzed this year’s budget and Mayor Bloomberg’s November financial plan and determined that spending for classroom instruction and school administration could drop by $300 million in 2013, a 3.3 percent decrease.

That’s because funds would likely have to be redirected to other areas of the DOE where costs are soaring, according to the report: pre-kindergarten special education contracts with private schools are set to increase by 10 percent, to $100 million; fringe benefits for school employees are expected to increase 2.5 percent, to $68 million; and payments to charter schools, which are enrolling more students each year, will go up 5.6 percent to $46 million.

City officials disputed the IBO’s projections of next year’s spending as premature.

“It’s impossible to say what we’re spending next year because we haven’t put out a budget, for schools or any other agency yet,” said City Hall spokesman Marc LaVorgna. A preliminary budget for the 2013 fiscal year is expected in January or February. (more…)

Lawyers for the Department of Education were back on the defense in Judge Paul Feinman’s courtroom on Thursday morning to argue a new twist on an old charter school co-location debate.

A new lawsuit argues that more than 80 charter schools sited in public school buildings have gotten free rides on facilities expenses such as utilities and building maintenance. Parent groups who brought the lawsuit earlier this summer are suing want the DOE to collect more than $100 million in rent money that they say should have been charged.

Today’s hearing on the lawsuit, which did not yield an immediate decision, comes less than two months after the same judge rejected the United Federation of Teachers and NAACP’s request to halt all charter school co-locations. That lawsuit argued that the co-location plans favored the charter schools.

In today’s hearing, arguments focused on the city’s policy, in place since 2003, that lets charter schools share space free of charge. Eighty two charter schools are now occupied in public buildings that house an estimated 27,500 students, according to court papers.

New York State charter law, first written in 1999, states that charter schools can be located within a public school building “at cost” based on what they are charged to rent, lease or own private or public space. How much “at cost” should be worth – if anything at all – was a major source of disagreement between the sides.

Arthur Schwartz, arguing for the plaintiffs, said in court that the charter schools in public school buildings should have to pay for the per-pupil costs because it provided them with inequitably favorable resources at a time when district schools are forced to cut their budgets.

“It gets at the heart of some of the disparities of the tales that we’ve heard in the schools,” Schwartz told Feinman. (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…)

The City Council is requiring the education department to provide more transparent reporting to support claims for two of its signature achievements: higher graduation rates and fewer failing schools.

In the midst of finalizing next year’s city budget, the council managed to pass two bills that target the Department of Education’s bookkeeping. One of them requires the department to disclose more detailed information about students who leave the system without graduation. The second mandates the release of information about students who do not graduate when their high schools close.

Under the first bill, the DOE will be forced to provide more detailed data about student discharge rates, which critics say is overused by schools in order to inflate graduation rates. In 2009, Leonie Haimson, of Class Size Matters, released a report that found discharge rates steadily climbed since 2000. That prompted a state audit that concluded the dropout rate was in fact higher than claims made by the DOE.

Out of 88,612 students from the 2004-2008 cohort, 19 percent – or 17,025 – were discharged and 10 percent – or 9,323 – dropped out, according to the audit.

“This bill will for the first time allow us to know what happened to the thousands of students every year who are discharged from high schools,” Haimson said. “It will make it possible to see if they’re honestly reporting discharge rates. (more…)

Spending going directly to schools would decrease along with the number of teachers in the city, while spending on instructional administration, transportation, and school food would all increase if Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed 2012 budget is passed.

Those are among the findings of an analysis of the mayor’s proposed 2012 budget released by the Independent Budget Office today.

The budget also calls for cutting spending on general education and special education instruction by between 1 and 2 percent and making large cuts to funds for school facilities and safety. The cuts to classroom spending include the loss of more than 6,000 teaching positions, with more than 4,600 of those positions lost through layoffs.

Meanwhile, spending on the DOE’s central administration would grow by 10 percent from this school year, though it would still be lower than it was between 2005 and 2010.

The IBO analysis also predicts that the city will have a slightly smaller surplus to roll over into next year than the Bloomberg administration has estimated, $2.9 billion compared to the mayor’s estimate of $258 million more. The surplus has attracted attention from the teachers union, which points to its existence to argue that the mayor shouldn’t have to lay off teachers.

But the analysis shows that neither surplus would be enough to use to plug the projected 2012 shortfall. (more…)

Reversing its earlier findings, the city’s Independent Budget Office has concluded in a new study that most New York City charter schools receive more funding per student than their district school peers.

A year ago, an IBO study found that charter schools housed in public school buildings received $305 less per student than district schools for the 2008-09 school year. Now, the office has revised its methodology and has reached a very different conclusion.

In 2008-09, charter schools in district space were given $701 more per student than traditional public schools, the new study finds. For the 2009-10 school year, that disparity shrunk to $649. (more…)

Chancellor Cathie Black showed what she has learned and what she hasn't in her first month on the job on NY1 last night.

Chancellor Cathie Black’s interview on Inside City Hall last night is worth watching in full. The interview exposes just how much Black has been able to absorb in her first month on the job — and how much she hasn’t.

In a moment first highlighted by NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ on Twitter, Black declared, ”The public school system in New York City has been unbelievably successful since the birth of our nation.” She was responding to a question from host Errol Louis about why she chose to send her children to private rather than public city schools.

Black did not elaborate, but the statement is confusing given that public schools in New York City did not emerge until the early 1800s.

Another moment of exposure had to do with teacher attrition. After a discussion about the “last in, first out” policy, Louis asked Black if she was concerned that almost half of New York City school teachers leave after 6 years in the classroom (PDF link).

Here’s how Black responded:

Well you have to know, like, what’s really at the heart of the issue. I don’t know that we know what’s really at the heart of the issue. Teaching is a hard job. We want the ones who are committed. We want the ones who make a difference. We want the ones who want to work hard and really change the lives of these young people. They’re there on a mission. So, you know, some are going to leave.

She then returned to the “last in, first out” question, arguing that perhaps teachers would be less likely to leave if they weren’t concerned about being laid off. “Right now there have to be a lot of teachers thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t have a job next year.’ Can we afford to have thousands of teachers think to themselves, ’I have to leave the system now because I may not have a job in a few months?’ That’s going to be a catastrophe,” she said.

For years, researchers have asked why teachers leave schools — particularly struggling schools. A 2007 paper by a group studying New York City teachers, the Teacher Pathways Project, summarized the major findings this way:

• “Teachers are more likely to stay in schools in which student achievement is higher and teachers — especially white teachers — are more likely to stay in schools with higher proportions of white students.”
• “Teachers who score higher on tests of academic achievement are more likely to leave,” as are teachers from out of town.
• Less-qualified teachers are more likely to stay at a school than teachers with higher qualifications, “especially if they teach in low-achieving schools.” (more…)

The 25 schools the city is trying to close are low-performing, but their students are among the city’s most challenging — and are only getting needier over time.

Those are the findings of a report released today by the Independent Budget Office, the city’s data watchdog.

City officials argue that these low-performing schools should be closed because other schools serve similar student populations with better results. But critics of the closures often counter that the schools were set up to fail after the city sent them comparatively larger numbers of under-prepared, special needs and English language learning students.

The report confirms that many of the schools slated for closure have been enrolling increasingly high percentages of the city’s most challenging students since 2005.

In 10 of the 14 high schools on the closure list, for example, ninth-graders who entered the school in 2009 arrived with lower scores than their predecessors in 2007. The percentage of students entering the schools overage has grown to more than double the citywide average. (more…)

Before voting to renew Mayor Bloomberg’s control of the city’s schools last summer, New York’s legislature demanded that an expert be brought in to sift through the Department of Education’s data.

Critics of his administration felt the city had juked its school stats. To address their concerns, money was set aside for the Independent Budget Office to hire a DOE data watchdog. Nearly a year later, Raymond Domanico has arrived as the IBO’s Director of Education Research. Prior to  joining the IBO, Domanico worked for 11 years as the Senior Education Advisor to the Industrial Areas Foundation – Metro NY, a network of community organizations.

What about being the IBO’s director of education research appealed to you?

Back in July, I was hosting a group of people from Germany, from Berlin, who had come to visit our schools. At the close of dinner they said to me, “Ray, if you were in charge, what would you do with the school system?” And I gave them the same answer I’ve been giving a lot of people over the last year and a half. I said, “You know, there’s been so much change in the New York City schools and it’s happened so quickly, and we really don’t have a very deep sense of what worked and what has not worked.”

And so I found myself unable to answer the question as to what we should do going forward. It seems to me that given the amount of change that’s gone on, this is the appropriate time to step back and to do some in-depth analysis. (more…)