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Data from the Department of Education show which school support organizations are gaining schools and which are losing them.

Given the choice to switch to a new support organization, most schools are deciding to stay put, Department of Education data that I obtained today show. Eric Nadelstern, the city’s chief schools officer, confirmed the data in a short telephone interview.

Nadelstern said the information is “gratifying” because it indicates schools are happy with the level of service they are receiving. But he said that he hopes that in the future schools will make their decisions based not just on their own experiences, but also on data showing how well students inside each support organization’s umbrella are performing academically. (Data were released for the first time earlier this year.)

A large group schools next year will also join a trial organizational model known as the Children First Network, which tries to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical supports. Twenty networks of schools will join the Children First Network next year, Nadelstern told me. Each network includes about 20 schools, suggesting that the total number of schools moving into the Children First Network is increasing to about 490, roughly a third of all city schools. (more…)

One thing that went under the radar during the nonstop news cycle of the last few weeks is a sizable data dump from the Department of Education, which for the first time released statistical reports about the 11 organizations that support the city’s schools.

The reports went online last week to inaugurate the period when schools can choose which organization they want to affiliate with. The organizations, called School Support Organizations, or SSOs, have provided support services to individual schools for the last two years in place of the traditional school-district bureaucracy. This is the first time that the DOE has allowed schools to change the affiliation they originally selected back in 2007.

The new reports include a chart (above) comparing the SSOs according to their schools’ progress report scores, quality review evaluations, and principal satisfaction survey results. The result is the public evaluation that Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer who formerly ran the Empowerment organization, said back in January was being cooked up the department’s accountability office. The comparison, which takes into account school data from the 2007-2008 school year, shows that the SSO run by the City University of New York did the best, followed closely by the Empowerment organization.

The reports are available on the DOE’s Web site only in PDF format, and there is a different one for each organization. A DOE spokeswoman told me that the department had not made available a database compiling the data, so I went ahead and made one, available here or after the jump. I also went one step further and added some calculations of my own, based on the DOE’s data: The percent change in progress report and quality review scores from 2007 to 2008.

Among my first impressions: Schools either improved their internal operations significantly between 2007 and 2008, or else they figured out how to look like they had improved, because the percentage of schools receiving top ratings on their Quality Reviews jumped in every organization.

If you have more statistics knowhow than I do and some extra time on your hands (like during this school vacation), take a look and note what you see. Leave your observations in the comments. (more…)

The Daily News reported yesterday that Tweed Courthouse, the Department of Education’s headquarters, added bureaucrats to its staff as the city schools underwent millions of dollars of budget cuts. That’s true: Official records show that there were 30 more people working at Tweed this January than in January of 2008.

But outside of Tweed, in a set of administrative offices scattered across the five boroughs, DOE bureaucrats are losing their jobs. These other offices — a mix of “integrated service centers” and “school support organizations,” which help schools with tasks like managing payroll, providing food, and teacher training — lost a combined 114 staff in the last year. I don’t know the breakdown between SSO and ISC cuts, or what kind of jobs were lost; I’ve asked the DOE, and would love reader advice on this. (more…)

The latest issue of Education Next has a study on Philadelphia’s experiment in having outside groups manage public school. The study, by two Harvard researchers, finds that for-profit school managers, including schools run by the commercial Edison Learning company, ran schools better than both the school district and non-profit groups.

The for-profit vs. nonprofit breakdown does not apply in New York, where all outside support organizations are not-for-profits. But the study’s authors suggest that the variable of real importance might be not the profit motive, but experience:

The two main for-profit providers had much more experience with school management than did any of the nonprofit organizations. The nonprofits seem to have been selected more for their strong political ties than for any history of effectiveness at delivering educational services. Others have reported that newly formed charter schools under both for-profit and nonprofit management appear to become more effective as they gain in experience. That could easily account for the pattern of results reported here.

The Department of Education is evaluating school support organizations as I type. Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said the results should be out in the spring. He told me he doesn’t predict that outside (PSO) vs. district (LSO) support groups’ performance will follow any clear pattern. “It’s likely to cut both ways,” he said. “Some of the PSO’s will be high-ranking and others will not. It’s going to be hard to draw hard and fast distinctions by SSO type.”

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…)