Bad News? We Don’t Need No Stinking Bad News!

The New York City Department of Education web site has had a dramatic facelift, with almost every new whistle and bell you could want.

If you want information and data on a school, you type the name into the conveniently located search engine, and it will take you to what is called a NYC DOE portal for that school. We searched Stuyvesant High School, and we were taken here. On the left hand side of the page there is a category “Statistics,” and if you click on it, it takes you to a page that has all of the DOE’s statistical reports. You can read the Stuyvesant High School’s Learning Environment Survey, its Quality Review Report, its School Report Card, its Budget, its Weekly Attendance, its Register, its Expenditure Report, its Galaxy Budget Allocations, its Table of Organization [with budget allocation], and its Building and School Facilities Report.

Everything you could want to know, right?

Well, we went looking for the most important statistic for a high school, its graduation rate. In previous years, the graduation rate was part of the school report card. But when you go to the School Report Card from this web portal, you find a truncated report, less than 1/3 the length of the old Report Card. Here’s the previous year’s Stuyvesant report card, with all of the graduation and drop out data on the last page. The new report card tells you what Stuyvesant’s students plan to do after graduation, just like last year’s report card does, but it manages to omit the information on how many students actually reach that goal.

We spent well over an hour trying in vain to find the single most important statistic for a high school, the graduation rate, before we want to our top secret union maven for assistance. Take a shot at it yourself before you find out how to do it below the fold.

Here’s what you have to do. Under the School Report Card link, a sentence reads “For additional information on assessment, please visit our pages at http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/.” Click on the link, and it will take you to the homepage of the Office of Assessment and Accountability. On this page, go to the second bullet under Accountability Reports, 2005-2006 School Report Cards. This takes you to a map of New York City. If you remember that Stuyvesant High School was in Region 9 last year, you click on that region and you are brought to Region Nine reports, and if you remember that within Region 9, it was geographically located in District 2 [of course, it never actually was in District 2, because it was a high school], you click on that District, and it brings you to District 2 Schools, and if know that its code is M475, you scroll down the page until that reach that code, and then click on the NY State Report. On this page, you must click on Accountability and Overview Report, not on the Comprehensive Information Report. Finally, on page 11 of the state Accountability and Overview Report, you will find the graduation rate for Stuyvesant High School, 99%.

What all that statistical information on the new DOE web site, do you think someone calculated the odds of the uninitiated being able to actually find the graduation rate?

 Print