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The organizations that schools can choose to affiliate with for bureaucratic support, like New Visions for Public Schools, the Knowledge Network, and the Empowerment network, are being graded this month for their effectiveness. The Department of Education’s accountability office is writing the grades of the “school support organizations,” and Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said the outcome will eventually be made public.

“It will definitely be public before schools have to make the selection as to which SSO they want to affiliate with next year, so that parents and teachers and principals can make that decision on the basis of all sorts of factors,” Nadelstern said yesterday.

The school support organizations were created last year as part of an overhaul of the school system’s bureaucracy. Rather than being forced to report to the superintendent in their neighborhood, schools can shop around among a set of support organizations to decide which bureaucracy they prefer.

This is the first year that the support organizations will be graded, since they’ve now amassed a year’s worth of a track record in student test scores. Nadelstern said that the accountability office, headed up by Columbia law professor Jim Liebman, is basing its grades on both schools’ progress report cards and on their quality reviews, written reports about schools based on in-person interviews and observations.

The report cards have come under heavy criticism for being statistically problematic, if not meaningless. (more…)

By the end of this school year, the Department of Education will have spent more than $300 million on its accountability initiative, according to a report released today by the city’s Independent Budget Office.

The DOE disputes the IBO’s figure, saying the report includes more initiatives than are actually part of the accountability project. It says the true figure is more like $100 million.

The city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, commissioned the report, which is bound to intensify debate about whether accountability measures should be cut during the coming budget crunch. (more…)