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As any teacher or student can attest, there’s only so much that a letter grade can tell you about the person who earned it, even if it’s an A.

That’s even more true for the city’s progress report grades, released for the 2011-2012 school year on Monday. Schools get a single letter grade after the Department of Education crunches hundreds of data points, using complex algorithms to measure the schools against each other in addition to absolute standards. The department has a small fleet of officials generating the annual grades, and the spreadsheet containing the underlying data for this year’s scores stretched to 240 columns.

We sorted and re-sorted the spreadsheet to look at some of the city’s many measures of school quality in different ways. Here are a few of the most interesting things we found — and leave a comment to share your data-driven observations.

Four of the top five highest-scoring schools also made the top five last year (marked with an asterisk):

It Takes A Village Academy (Brooklyn)*
Manhattan Village Academy (Manhattan)*
Academy for Careers and Television in Film (Queens)
Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design (Brooklyn)*
Brooklyn International High School (Brooklyn)*

Four of the five lowest-scoring schools are in Manhattan:

Academy for Social Action: A College Board School (Manhattan)
Choir Academy of Harlem (Manhattan)
Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School (Manhattan)
Boys and Girls High School (Brooklyn)
High School of Graphic Communication Arts (Manhattan)

At 49 schools, less than 5 percent of 2008′s ninth-graders graduated this year ready for college. Of them, six got A’s: (more…)

P.S. 199 in the South Bronx, one of the city's top-rated elementary schools in recent years. A high rate of its former students' test scores plummeted once they moved onto middle school.

The Department of Education crunches state test scores in dozens of ways to measure the performance of schools, principals, teachers, and students. But it does not perform a statistical analysis that can reveal whether an elementary school’s graduates have received test scores that far outstrip their actual skills.

Researchers say it would be relatively easy for the department to calculate “swing rates” to find the proportion of students from each school whose scores rise or fall by a statistically unlikely margin when they move to another school. Such an analysis could take some of the burden off of individual educators to report suspicions of cheating.

The city used to conduct swing rate analysis prior to the Bloomberg administration, according to a former testing official, and the state is poised to launch the measure as part of an overhaul of its own approach to test security.

But department officials say the analysis would be too onerous. They also say that they never launch investigations into cheating based on data anomalies alone. Instead, they say they will dispatch investigators only when they receive formal allegations of test improprieties.

The policy means that some top-rated schools whose students’ scores plummet at far higher than the average rate never have their testing practices scrutinized.

For all of the criticism of state tests as being arbitrary and imperfect measures of student performance, they are remarkably stable. In 2011, students who saw their scores fall by more than two standard deviations from the previous year made up just 0.6 percent of the sixth grade test-taking population in English, and 0.4 percent in math. That degree of decline is highly improbable under normal circumstances and is more likely to reflect externalities than real changes in academic proficiency. (more…)

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…)