GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Investigators who look into the city’s schools received more allegations and opened more cases than ever last year. But they found wrongdoing less often than at any time in the last decade.

And once again, only a tiny fraction of the investigations were made public.

The Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation received 4,173 complaints in 2012, 20 percent more than in the previous year, according to the annual report it released today. The complaints prompted 795 investigations.

SCI looks into alleged violations of law and department regulations, from accusations of sexual misconduct to concerns about fraud and embezzlement, to allegations of cheating on tests. (The Department of Education also has an internal investigative unit, the Office of Special Investigations.) (more…)

This month’s Atlantic Monthly reports on the Obama administration’s efforts to open up government through the Internet. Here’s the coolest part, via the Atlantic, something called “API documentation”:

It’s not just the API that’s a big deal, Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief data architect, told me. “It’s the discipline an API imposes,” he said. To build one, an agency has to record and store data in a way that anticipates public use. “Data sharing is no longer an afterthought,” Elin explained. “You begin with the notion that you’re going to share information. And you’re going to make it easy for people.”

Compare to the New York City Department of Education, which has not produced financial expenditure reports (lists of exactly how taxpayer dollars were spent) since 2004! and which often releases school test score data in unwieldy PDF’s impenetrable to outside analysis. As Eduwonkette put it in July:

Unfortunately, denying data access appears to be a growing Department of Education strategy – in this case, the DOE failed to release data, and in other cases, they have released data only in PDF formats that no one can analyze. There is something deeply troubling about an administration that bows down at the altar of “data-driven decision making” but refuses the public access to data that rightfully should be available in a spreadsheet on their website.

The report that surfaced on Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf last week, coming to public light months after it was written, is one of hundreds that investigators who study the Department of Education did not publicly release in 2007.

The office that generates the reports — overseen by Richard Condon, an attorney who serves as the special commissioner of investigations for the city schools — last year investigated hundreds of alleged violations of law and department regulations, from accusations of sexual misconduct to concerns about fraud and embezzlement to allegations of cheating on tests. More than 300 of these cases were substantiated, according to SCI’s year-end statistical report (PDF). But the office only put out 26 press releases highlighting its investigations, a ratio of about 8%. The pattern was similar in 2006 and 2005: (more…)