School Report Cards came out today (or at least some of them did–the links on many aren’t working). State Education Commissioner Richard Mills held a press conference with a 50-plus page PowerPoint that summarized the statewide data, albeit with a huge dollop of “spin.”
Mills said everyone and everything is progressing nicely, the achievement gaps are narrowing and “tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possible,” which, as I learned in a French lit class, means “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” I believe the character who uttered this phrase was delusional.
Anyway, much of Mills’ presentation was devoted to summaries of test score data that are more than a year old. Remember, we won’t have the 2006 test results until the end of the summer because State Ed is switching to a new testing regimen. There was one interesting item specific to the city: the daily student attendance rate, which at about 89% was lower than any other group. Lower than rural schools, suburban schools, or even the “Big Four” districts–the cities of Yonkers, Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester–which usually do worse than NYC in all these score wars.
I’m tempted to say: who wants to go to school when there’s nothing left but blocks of test-prep math and ELA, but I would never be so negative.
The other item of interest was the state’s decision to correlate attendance and graduation rates. They said they found a strong correlation–turns out if you don’t go to school you don’t graduate! But seriously, districts with low attendance rates have low graduation rates, and that led them to say they are planning to start tracking these two indicators and pressuring districts to improve.
Also today, on the DOE web site under “Reports” is a link to the new 4-year graduation reports for the Class of 2005 and the 7-year report for the Class of 2002.
These reports are usually full of interesting stuff, but they don’t open! Or at least they didn’t as of 5:30 this evening, though I tried all afternoon. Hmmmm. We already know the “big number” from the graduation report: it was in the Mayor’s Management Report in February and said the graduation rate had dropped slightly, something that Klein swept under the carpet really quickly.
But lots of people are awaiting the graduation data. Oprah Winfrey did a two-part report with guest Bill Gates on the graduation “crisis” in the public schools last month, and there’s a big spotlight on this topic. Also, as an earlier Edwize post discussed, researchers Jay Greene and Larry Mishel are disputing the way graduation rates are tallied. More to come on graduation rates if and when DOE gets those links working….
NEW-ish! Report Cards and Graduation Rates
Don’t miss
4 Comments:
1 jd2718
· May 6, 2006 at 10:56 am
Maisie,
I always find the lag in data to be frustrating. And, boy, would I love to get this stuff in a different format, so I could play with the numbers. Instead I looked at the static portrait of my school, and a couple others.
Do you know if they make the system-wide data available in excel or access?
jonathan
2 Neil
· May 9, 2006 at 12:42 pm
I find the school report cards valuable, yet frustrating. They’re certainly clearer than the eye-blurring Excel spreadsheets that DOE also posts, but they’re so darn bureaucratic. They don’t give any indication of what’s really happening in a school, what their program is like or, if there’s an improvement or a slump in achievement, what was responsible for it.
Alerted by Maisie’s entry, I went looking for the report card of a school that I’m curious about. At the School Accountability Status bar at the bottom of page 1, I saw that it had received a Year 1 warning (God bless NCLB). Why, I wondered. Plowing through to page 13, I found that the reason was that it had fallen 2 percentage points below having 95% test participation by fourth-grade English language learners.
What the heck does that mean in real life? Are we to assume that this school is in trouble — /deep trouble/ — because only 93% of the 146 fourth-grade ELLs (of whom only 62 were continuously enrolled from the previous October) took the test? Still, the report card says, the Performance Index for this group is 132, higher than the minimum 119 Annual Measurable Objective that had been set for them. /So the ELL kids who took the test in fact did better than the minimum, yet the school has gotten a warning./
So what do the Year 1 warning and these data tell us? About zippo, as far as I can see. Maybe all that the alleged minimal shortfall in test participation means is that a few kids were absent due to unexcused illness or family problems that day.
I’m sure that the staff at this school are in a lather about the warning, but maybe all they have to do is get a few more kids to show up for this year’s test.
I’ll check back next spring to see if the warning is gone and I should watch the night sky for fireworks announcing that the Klein-Bloomberg approach has worked for this school.
3 Maisie
· May 11, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Sorry for the late answer to Jonathan’s question, but no, to my knowledge the DOE does not provide school report card or graduation data in Excel or any other spreadsheet form. Why would they? Then we could actually do some of our own research. Both of these reports are available only as PDFs on the web site. However, researchers do get hold of the data in usable form. Just don’t say you’re from the UFT when you call the Division of Assessment and Accountability at 212-374-3990.
4 jd2718
· May 13, 2006 at 8:43 am
Thanks Maisie,
the problem with requesting data, is that I don’t know what I am looking for. I like having a mass of raw data and playing with it, looking at it sideways, noticing patterns, anomalies. But if I do have particular questions, at least I can use that number. Thanks
Jonathan