GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Behind the letter grade that each city high school received this week is a mess of data.

Progress report scores take into account everything from how many ninth-graders earned six credits in academic courses to the number of overage students to the relative performance of students with special needs. The city’s spreadsheet containing the underlying data for the progress reports runs to more than 200 columns.

We sorted and re-sorted the spreadsheet to look at the city’s measures of school quality in different ways. Here are some of the most interesting things we found.

The top five highest-scoring schools include three schools for new immigrants (marked with asterisks):

Brooklyn International High School (Brooklyn)*
Manhattan Village Academy (Manhattan)
It Takes A Village Academy (Brooklyn)*
Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design (Brooklyn)
Manhattan Bridges High School (Manhattan)*

The top five lowest-scoring schools:

Manhattan Theatre Lab High School (Manhattan)
High School of Graphic Communication Arts (Manhattan)
Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School (Bronx)
Herbert H. Lehman High School (Bronx)
Freedom Academy High School (Brooklyn)

Seven schools didn’t get progress reports after their data raised red flags with department officials: (more…)

The city is moving forward with Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to avoid educator layoffs by freezing their salaries by writing it into school budgets for next year.

Neither the teachers union nor the principals union has agreed to Bloomberg’s plan, but budgets that principals are receiving today assume that the plan will become a reality. In an email to principals this morning, Klein said Bloomberg’s plan would save the city $400 million and eliminate the need for teacher layoffs. But the city would still lose about 2,000 teachers through attrition, and schools will still see their budgets cut by about 4 percent, he wrote.

Klein will answer principals’ questions about the budgets during a webcast tomorrow morning.

One question might be how exactly the city calculated its savings. In January, when the city cut the raises it had planned for teachers and principals unions in half, Klein said the city would save $148 million. It’s unclear how cutting the other half of the raises could yield the city $400 million.

Klein’s email, which is posted below, also includes an update about the hiring freeze. (more…)