If they were just a waste of money… but no, they actually do damage (school closings, right? but also all the time wasted in schools preparing for multiple, contradictory accountability measures – all the education kids are getting cheated out of)

It’s time to dump the entire NYCDoE accountability office.

Jonathan

Regarding the graduation rates and who is included:

I used the graduation rates listed on the data sets available for the 2009 Progress Reports because these are the rates the DoE used when it graded schools that did and did not served self-contained students against each other. No one in the schools that serve these students would be surprised by the different graduation rates, but they might be surprised to find they were graded schools that did not serve them.

The Progress Report 4-year graduation rate takes into account all students including students in self-contained classes. IEP diplomas are not counted as diplomas. I believe this is the same way the state counts. The DoE Educator Guide says that in the Progress Report , the 4-Year rate includes “all students who are assigned to the 2005 cohort year .”

In addition, as in my previous post on grad rates, the posted chart is made from the data available for schools in the composite peer group of the closing schools — approximately 190 in all. The peer groups are written on each school’s Progress Report and the data itself comes from the High School Progress Report data sets and the Special Education Delivery Reports.

It is possible that other demographic or statistical factors drove school grades, and that in a more thorough analysis the influence of self-contained students would be better understood . It would also be interesting to know the impact of self-contained students on the allocation of school resources as a whole, since the impact of self-contained students on a school cannot be measured simply by looking at their own graduation rates.

In any case, the DoE argues that the schools are failures, and bases that argument on Progress Reports and the graduation rates that are a part of them. What I see when I look at the same numbers are statistical errors and demographic differences, and the inadequate response of a DoE that does little more than incentivize and punish the people trying to make a difference in teenage lives.

And the irony is this: what is likely to happen as a result of these closings? DoE with all its emphasis on information will dismantle some strong programs developed by the people who actually work with these students. They will dismantle them without any without any serious, rigorous – and truer — analysis of what works – -and with no plan whatsoever to replace what they destroy.

The DoE data sets and Educator Guide can be found here:
http://schools.nyc.gov/Accountability/SchoolReports/ProgressReports/default.htm)

One might think that the commissioner is attempting to turn the clock back to a time when special education children had their own school. He is apparently setting up a filter made of charter schooling to keep various special needs populations away from the general population.