Another Squandered Opportunity: Parents, Students and Educators Slam NYSED's Flawed ESSA Proposal

Lisa Rudley of NYSAPE interviewed by News12

See the article in The 74 about the Brooklyn hearings and the problems with the NYSED proposed accountability system.  News12 also carried our press conference before the hearings. See this oped by Nick Tampio about  how the proposed accountability system fails students.   

You can send your own comments on the proposed plan through June 16 by emailing ESSAComments@nysed.gov 
A few remaining hearings remain, including in Queens on June 10.  For more information visit the NYSED ESSA page here. 

The auditorium was nearly full at the New York State Education Department's ESSA hearings in Brooklyn last night; especially with students and teachers from the transfer schools, who spoke passionately about how their schools would be unfairly targeted for intervention given the current ESSA proposal to rate schools largely on their test scores, graduation rates, and attendance. 

Students from the S. Brooklyn Community HS, E. Brooklyn Community HS, James Baldwin, and Brooklyn Frontier, all transfer schools, plus Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning school, which like Baldwin is also a performance-based assessment school -- all testified about how these schools had literally saved their lives, but would be at risk of closure or radical disruption given all the challenges the students at  these "second chance" schools face.

Students from S. Brooklyn Community HS

The ESSA law specifically identifies for intervention any high school where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate. The regulations put out by former US Education Secretary King specified that this must be measured by the school's four-year graduation rate, and though those regs were luckily ditched by the Trump administration,  even if measured by their six-year rates plus attendance could doom NYC transfer schools and make them potential targets for intervention or closure.

This is because many students at transfer schools enter these schools undercredited after two or three years of high school or more.  Many also enroll students who must have part-time jobs to support themselves and their families, may have children themselves,  have recently come out of the criminal justice system, or suffer other life challenges that make a rigid assessments of school quality based on graduation rates or attendance unfair. 

One after another, students at spoke of how they had dropped out of large overcrowded NYC high schools where no one knew their name, and had finally found their way to transfer schools which had given them a second home, provided counseling and small classes with the attention they needed to learn,  and had put them on the road towards success.   

One student spoke to how she had come out of a psychiatric ward and had luckily found her way to the Brooklyn Community High school, which welcomed her, gave her the support she needed and now she's in college to become a counselor.  Another student said, "Wouldn't it be ironic if the Every Student Succeeds Act worked against allowing every student to succeed" by unfairly labeling his school as "failing" even as it had provided him the opportunities he needed to thrive.  Another student said, "I don't need to cite evidence for the value of transfer schools; I am the evidence right here.  My school works."

I spoke about how their testimony further revealed the need to measure schools by Opportunity to Learn factors -- including small classes, number of counselors, and a well-rounded education -- which all too few NYC schools now provide, with more than 350,000 students crammed into classes of 30 or more.  Not only would these factors more fairly judge the quality of these particular schools, but if the high schools in which these students were originally enrolled exhibited these qualities in the first place, perhaps these students wouldn't have dropped out.  My full testimony is here.

We would also save thousands more students who fail to graduate to this day or those who receive a second-class education which does not give them the instructional feedback and emotional support they need to succeed in college or career. Moreover, by including a range of factors rather than merely one or two high-stakes indicators, the state would lessen the risk that relying on any single factor would unfairly judge schools or cause them to "game" the system, by excluding or pushing out the neediest students.  As one of the transfer school principals said, if you judge our schools by these rigid metrics, you will be discouraging us from admitting the most at-risk students.

Many Brooklyn parents, including those from D15 Parents for Middle School Equity, also spoke about how rating schools in such a reductionist way may lead to even more inequities and segregation, as the indicators proposed by NYSED are intimately correlated with students' socio-economic status. Below is a video of Tracey Scronic, a Brooklyn parent and educator, making the point that the current ESSA proposal will discriminate against her ESL students. As she said, New York stands at a cross-roads and has the opportunity to lead and promote equity-- rather than further undermine schools and the disadvantaged students that they serve.

Under the video of Tracey is the NYSAPE/CSM press release we put out at the end of the evening, with quotes from parent leaders throughout the state, as well as Kelley Wolcott, a teacher at South Brooklyn Community High school.   It was an inspiring evening; let's hope the Commissioner and the Regents were listening! 



Tracey Scronic at ESSA hearings 6.6.17 from Class Size Matters on Vimeo.

For immediate release: June 6,2017
Contact: Kemala Karmen 917-807-9969 | kemala@nycpublic.org

Brooklyn, NY—Frustrated public school parents, activists, and educators gathered in front of the Prospect Heights Education Complex this evening to protest the New York State Education Department’s new schools accountability proposal and the sham process that supposedly generated it. Inside the building, department officials were setting up for one of several hearings scheduled across the state in order to gain feedback on the proposal, which was created to comply with recent federal legislation.  

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is the successor legislation to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) bill. While ESSA preserves much of NCLB, including an onerous and misguided annual testing requirement for all children in grades 3-8, it also gives states more latitude in defining their school accountability systems than did NCLB, primarily through the inclusion of an additional “school quality indicator.”

For this reason, New York’s families and educators were looking forward to the state creating an accountability system that incentivized schools to provide children with a high quality, well-rounded education. ESSA also includes a statement that explicitly recognizes a parent’s right to opt their child out of testing without consequences for the school or district, a point that is crucial in a state where hundreds of thousands of parents have boycotted the tests as developmentally inappropriate and deleterious to their children’s educations.

Instead of benefiting from the flexibility of  the legislation, New York State Education Department, under Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, let down New York’s children, parents, educators, and schools, by submitting an accountability proposal for Board of Regents approval that squanders the  opportunities that ESSA confers. Its proposed accountability system doubles down on testing, counts opt out students as having failed the exams for the purpose of school accountability, and guarantees the continuation of narrowed test-prep curriculum that has spurred the nation’s largest test refusal movement.

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and a member of the NYSED ESSA Think Tank’s Accountability work group, said, “Even though the largest number of people who responded to the NYSED survey wanted an Accountability system that would include elements of a well-rounded, holistic education providing the Opportunity to Learn, including small classes, and sufficient instruction in art, music, science and physical education, their input was ignored. Many schools in New York City and elsewhere have already narrowed the curriculum because of the over-emphasis on state exams.  Instead, NYSED proposes to add only a very few high-stakes indicators, such as student attendance and, in high school, access to advanced coursework.  This may have the unwanted effect of making schools offer even less art and music in favor of more AP courses. It is time that the State took account of what matters in providing children with a quality education.  This is their chance to do so by incorporating an Opportunity to Learning index in their formula.”

Johanna Garcia, NYC parent of public school students, contended that the proposal’s use of chronic absenteeism as the sole additional indicator for elementary and middle schools, along with test scores and ESL proficiency, meant that the accountability system would disproportionately punish high-poverty and high-immigrant school populations, while doing little to level the playing field among schools. “It is disheartening to see NYSED once again fail to take the opportunity to finally do right by students who have been ignored, penalized, and re-victimized by the very institution entrusted to lift them out of poverty. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that schools with high chronic absenteeism are suffering from concentrated numbers of homelessness, children in foster care, undocumented immigrant status, economic instability and special health and developmental needs. The proposed policies will further the inequities in our children’s education, while giving credence to the misconception that students from low income neighborhoods are less competent. This disconnect continues to be inexcusable and can no longer be accepted as the status quo.” 

Kelley Wolcott, a teacher at South Brooklyn Community High School, a transfer school that serves over-aged, under-credited students--at least a dozen of whom spoke movingly during the hearing about the lifesaving role the school played--agreed. "The proposed accountability measures would devastate our ability to serve the needs of diverse learners. For true accountability, the state needs to focus on and incentivize supplying the resources necessary for students to thrive, including small class sizes, less emphasis on high-stakes testing, fair funding, and a vastly reduced student-to-counselor ratio for students with a history of trauma. Very few schools in NYC still have nurses, let alone a real school-based support team. Without these things--and with the change in graduation requirements mandated by ESSA--we’ll see the destruction of the safety net provided by transfer schools for students who are pushed out of charter schools or drop out of large underfunded public schools where they are no more than an OSIS number." 

 Kemala Karmen, the parent of children who attend a 6-12 school in New York City, served on the Standards and Assessments work group of the Think Tank. “NYSED seemed intent on perpetuating the narrow strictures of NCLB. The nonpunitive plan (i.e., ask districts to analyze participation to ensure that students had not been systematically excluded, as per the intent of the law) that the majority of my work group proposed to address ESSA’s 95% testing participation mandate was rejected by the NYSED group leader who said it wouldn’t align with the Commissioner’s  expectations. This decision to reject the plan was not reflected in the official notes sent later. Leadership insisted that parents just needed to be ‘educated’ about the assessments, rather than acknowledging that the test refusal movement grew out of legitimate concerns with how testing is reshaping classrooms. Moreover, I couldn’t believe that research-based evidence was never shared or apparently considered during our deliberations.”

Jeanette Deutermann, Nassau county parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out, expressed particular consternation for the way that opt-out students will be figured into the accountability system. “It is clear that the option exists to leave opt out students out of the test score accountability formula. To choose instead, and arbitrarily, to count these students as having received low scores, solely for the purpose of rating schools, would make the entire  accountability system invalid. While we understand SED's temptation to discourage test refusals, accountability regulations will not change a parent's decision to protect their child from an unfair and unreliable testing regime.”

Eileen Graham, Rochester City School District parent advocate and founder of Black Student Leadership, sent a statement to be read: “Accountability needs to flow not only from the school to the state, but from the state to the schools. In order to succeed, the students of Rochester need the state to deliver well-resourced school facilities, prepared professional educators, and opportunities for teacher-created relevant curriculum. They should be ensuring that parents' voices are heeded and that capable leadership is at the helm. Regrettably, Commissioner Elia’s current ESSA proposal is just a continuation of the test-based accountability that we've had for decades and that has done little to lift Rochester City School District out of a state of educational emergency.”

Lisa Rudley, Ossining public school parent and founding member of NYSAPE, said, “As long as Commissioner Elia is steering the ship, the winds of discredited former Chancellor Tisch and NY Education Commissioner John King will remain. If real significant and meaningful change is going to occur, the Board of Regents needs to replace Elia with someone who represents what's in the best interest of the children. Otherwise, New York’s education policies will remain punitive and harmful to children and schools.”

New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) is a grassroots coalition with over 50 parent and educator groups across the state. Class Size Matters is a non-profit organization that advocates for smaller classes in NYC’s public schools and the nation as a whole.

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MDRC report on NYC small schools and gaming graduation rates

 

The latest version of the Gates-funded reports from MDRC has been released, showing graduation rates for NYC students who were assigned to the new small schools through the supposedly random HS admissions process were 6 to 9.5 percent higher compared to those who “lost” the lottery and were assigned to large schools instead.  Overall, it has some of the same weaknesses that I noted – along with others in the previous report:  

1-The comparison groups are not necessarily equally matched – it does not separate out free and reduced lunch students, who are expected to have very different outcomes.

2 – The comparison also does not separate out special education students who are severely disabled – those that are taught in a regular classroom vs. those assigned to self-contained classes.

Indeed, though it claims comparable figures in both sets of schools, the authors admit that for both special education students and English language learners, “the sample sizes for these subgroups” at the small schools were so limited they could not compare outcomes between both sets of students.

3- Not all small schools held lotteries, as not all of them were oversubscribed – only presumably the more popular schools which may have been those with the most successful outcomes.

Assuming that there are real advantages to attending a small school, there could be many reasons for this higher rates unmentioned in the report:

•  Peer effects:  given that a student has to attend an information session and apply to a small school, this screens out many of the most at-risk kids, including recent immigrants, those with unstable home lives and “over-the-counter” students – those who do not enter the high school application process and who, according to most accounts, are usually assigned to the large schools.  The effect of being in a class along with other more actively engaged students or those with more ambitious parents may in itself bring substantial benefits – apart from any quality inherent in the school itself.

• Though the report cites no difference in 10^th grade average class sizes (28), stats apparently drawn from the state report cards, this is highly unlikely, as many large high schools feature classes at the union contractual maximum of 34.  Generally small schools have been able to cap enrollment and thus class size at lower levels than the large schools.  In fact, the report says that the new schools were chosen by DOE according to whether they planned to have their teachers “responsible for a manageable number of students” with a “reduced teacher load” –which is unlikely to occur with class sizes at the contractual maximum.

•  During the Bloomberg administration, there has been tremendous pressure placed on New York City teachers to pass at least 80 percent of their students, and to boost their scores on Regents exams – with schools graded and teachers evaluated on the results. Until this year, in fact, teachers graded the Regents exit exams of students at their own schools, with staff at small schools marking the exams of their own students. 

See the terrific book by John Owens who worked at one of the small schools, entitled  Confessions of a Bad Teacher – making clear the immense pressure imposed on teachers to graduate as many students as quickly as possible. Given that the small schools have younger teachers and those less likely to have institutional memories of the way things used to be, the more likely it is that they will be responsive to these pressures.  As the report notes, principals appreciated how their teachers were more “adaptable.”

• Yet another issue that the report fails to address is how the rapid increase of small schools that are more space intensive and capped their enrollments at lower levels exacerbated conditions at the large schools– making them even more overcrowded with the highest need students, and significantly diminishing their educational opportunities.  Although the report notes that graduation rates have increased to a lesser extent at the large schools as well, many schools that had been relatively successful soon found themselves on the failing lists – including Lehman HS and quite a few others.

•  Finally, data is a funny thing and graduation rates can be calculated in all sorts of ways.  The state and the DOE both claim that the city’s graduation rates for the class of 2010 was 61 percent. The MDRC report estimates graduation rates for the same year in their study for students at the small schools at 74.6 percent and 65.1 percent for the matched comparison group – suggesting that those who applied to small schools were a comparatively higher achieving group, even among those “randomly” assigned to large schools.

Yet the most recent analysis from Education Week published last June showed NYC graduation rates for the class or 2010 at 54 percent. Among the 50 largest districts in the nation, only Albuquerque, Denver and Detroit had lower rates; with NYC tied with Milwaukee. Why the difference? 

EdWeek’s methodology is complex, but it basically calculates the graduating rate by comparing the number of students that enter high school each year to those who are promoted to the next grade, and then graduate four years later with a regular high school degree – figures that are hard to fudge.  In contrast, the state and the DOE exclude all students who are said to have transferred out of district or to private or parochial schools or who are “discharged” – including those who leave for GED programs.  

The oversight for student transfers and discharges is notoriously lax.  In a report I co-authored several years ago, we found a very high and rising discharge rate in NYC schools.  This report led to a 2011 audit from the NY State Comptroller’s office, which stated that more than half of all discharges lacked proper documentation; and that even after extensive searches by DOE, 10-15 percent of discharges should have been reported as dropouts. There has been no audit since. The MDRC study reports that data for fully 19 percent of students who entered both small schools and large couldn’t be found four years later.

The EdWeek list of graduation rates of the largest school districts in the country for the class of 2010 are here and below.  Official DOE figures show that the rate has only declined slightly since then.  Almost as disturbing is that NYC is the only district listed among the fifty that failed to provide enough information for EdWeek to conclude whether its graduation rate is higher or lower than would be predicted, given the demographic background of the students.  So much for transparency at Tweed!

District Grad Rates 2010 from Education Week by CSM

Concerns with the MDRC study on small schools released today

MDRC released a  study today, which the NY Times writes “appeared to validate the Bloomberg administration’s decade-long push to create small schools to replace larger, failing high schools.” The report mentions the current controversy over the massive number of school closings, here in NYC and across the country, and thus there may be a political element in the timing of its release:

MDRC’s findings about SSCs are relevant to current federal policy on high school reform, particularly the U. S. Department of Education’s School Improvement Grants (SIGs) for failing schools. Reforms funded by SIGs include school transformation, school restart, school closing, and school turnaround. SSCs straddle several of these categories since they are typically replacements for schools that have closed and they operate as regular public schools.

This is the second MDRC study to conclude that students who attended the new small schools had significantly improved outcomes.  The first MDRC study, released in 2010, looked at students who entered these schools in 2005; this one adds students who entered in 2006 to that group.

I have a lot of reservations about using this study or the previous study to justify the small schools initiative and especially to justify the current massive round of school closings.  I am no expert in statistics, but my concerns revolve around these issues: 

1-      Though the study points out that the small schools were supposedly “unscreened” and evaluates their results by comparing the outcomes of students who applied to the school through lotteries,  compared to those who lost the lottery, it  ignores that the students who attended these small schools were far less high-needs on average, as evidence by their lower rates of English language learners and special needs, as shown by this Annenberg study by Pallas and Jennings.  In fact, they were allowed to openly exclude special needs students during the first two years. Thus even with a “lottery” for admissions, there are substantial peer effects for students who are grouped with higher-achieving students which this study does not mention.  (This is also a problem with many of the charter school studies, like this one, which tend to ignore peer effects.)

2-      The results in terms of higher graduation rates and college readiness (based on Regents scores and credit accumulation) ignore how in NYC, teachers and principals are able manipulate these in ways that do not reflect real learning (especially as teachers grade the Regents of students in their own schools, and in these schools, their own students!)  It has also been alleged that the small schools pioneered the now widespread and largely discredited practice of “credit recovery.” With newer teachers at many of the small schools, who did not have a memory or tradition as to earlier practices, it may have been easier to pressure these teachers into employing such methods.

3-      The study ignores that the small schools on average were allowed to have smaller classes and were far less overcrowded than the large high schools, which legitimately could have led to better results.  The class size at the small schools during these years were from 13 to 20 students per class, according to the PSA first year report, compared to 30 or more at the larger schools.  If the higher needs students in the larger schools had been provided with smaller classes, very likely their chance of success would have been improved substantially as well.

4-      Yet the study doesn’t examine how the opening of the small schools had a negative impact on the system as a whole, by flooding nearly large high schools with the most disadvantaged and academically challenged students, leading to even more overcrowding, larger class sizes, and damaging their opportunity to learn, as reported by many observers and confirmed by the New School’s report, The New Marketplace.

5-      The MDRC study deals with only a subsection of the small schools that were oversubscribed and required a lottery for admissions, so like the charter school studies which use a similar methodology, their success rate may not be representative of small schools overall.

6-      It study ignores the reality that these so-called random “lotteries” may be far from actually random. The MDRC study compares the baseline characteristics of students who “won” the lotteries to those who lost, in a  Supplemental Table 1, which purports to show that both groups were “virtually identical”; but the comparison does not include students who required collaborative team-teaching or self-contained classes; does not include  prior attendance rates, a key factor that principals often examing when selecting students; and does not differentiate between free and reduced price lunch students.  The table also does not include data on previous rates of suspension.  According to an earlier evaluation done by Policy Studies Associates. the ninth graders who entered the small schools had far better attendance records (91% compared to 81%), and were less likely to have been suspended as 8^th graders compared to students at the schools they replaced.

Even in the categories the MRDC study does compare, there are greater numbers of higher achieving students, though the differences are not statistically significant, according to the model used.   Most strangely, the table compares the baseline data for four cohorts – entering ninth-graders from the 2004-2005 to 2007-2008 years; while the report compares outcomes for only the first two of these cohorts, students who entered these schools from 2005-6 and 2006-7. This is despite the fact that that the need level of students increased significantly after that point – and likely, the challenges faced by these schools as well.  See the above chart, for example, from the Annenberg study by Jennings and Pallas.

I have no idea why the MRDC study lumped together all these cohorts to examine their baseline characteristics, even as they only compared the outcomes for the first two, but it may considerably bias their conclusions.  Indeed, more than half of the middle and high schools being closed by the DOE this year for poor results are small schools that were founded after 2003.

7- There are several ways in which, especially in the early years of the small schools initiative, principals were able to manipulate the admissions process to get the students who were more likely to succeed, even though by definition these schools were supposedly “unscreened” and used “random” lotteries for admissions.  See this excerpt from a published study by Jennifer Jennings, who embedded herself with three small schools between March 2004 and September 2005: 

My observations revealed that many schools used applications, mandatory information sessions, and much stronger language to deter unwanted applicants. For example, 12 unscreened schools shared a similar application requiring that students provide the most recent report card and two letters of recommendation, one from an eighth-grade teacher and one from a guidance counselor, assistant principal, or principal. The application also asked for the student’s test scores, retention history, and involvement in advanced courses during the eighth grade. Finally, the application included additional questions requiring a narrative response….

The district’s application system provided opportunities for unscreened schools to choose higher achieving students. Through this computer system, each school received a list of students applying to the school, although the school did not know whether the student ranked it, for example, 1st or 12th. ….

The district’s application system provided opportunities for unscreened schools to choose higher achieving students. Through this computer system, each school received a list of students applying to the school, although the school did not know whether the student ranked it, for example, 1st or 12th. This data file included each student’s English-language-learner and special education classification, reading and math test scores, absences, grades, address, and junior high school. Schools were told to identify students who made an ‘‘informed choice’’ by assigning them a 1, while students who did not make an informed choice but the school was willing to accept were assigned a 2. If the school did not fill all of its seats with students making an informed choice, additional seats would be filled by students in the second category.  The Department of Education prohibits unscreened schools from using student performance data to select students. Nonetheless, both Marlena and Anna [pseudonyms for two principals of small schools] learned through their relationships with other principals that such regulations were loosely enforced….

 In addition to the English language learners and full-time special education students whom new schools had a waiver to eliminate, Renaissance [pseudonym for one of these small schools] eliminated part-time special education students and chose only those with 90 percent or higher attendance. Excel eliminated full- and part-time special education students and chose students with attendance rates of 93 percent or higher. 

There are many more revealing insights in the Jennings study about how the small schools were able to deflect over-the-counter students and counsel out low-performers to achieve better results, despite the fact that they claimed to be non-selective.  (Update: I have removed the link to the paper at the author's request; the abstract is here.)

All of these concerns  should provide one with reservations about the validity of the MDRC study and especially its apparent endorsement of the mayor's policies.

Statement on DiNapoli's discharge rate audit

We would like to thank the Comptroller Di Napoli and the Office of the State Comptroller for their hard work on today’s discharge rate audit, which was done in response to a request on April 30, 2009 from Betsy Gotbaum, then-NYC Public Advocate, following a report that we wrote with Jennifer Jennings on the continued high number of students reported as discharged from NYC public schools. (Our 2009 report is posted here)

Even after the OSC office allowed the DOE to provide “additional information and documentation” for randomly selected students who did not have sufficient evidence in their files, 15% of the general education students in the graduating class of 2008 who were reported as discharged, and 20% of those from the special education cohort did not have the required proof to show that they were not actually dropouts. Thus, all these students were improperly removed from the cohort, inflating DOE’s reported graduation rates.

The audit’s findings of an error rate of between 15-20% in reported discharge rates are cause for grave concern that the DOE is not providing sufficient oversight to ensure accurate graduation and discharge figures.

According to the OSC, this means that between 2000-3000 of the general education discharges and between 266 and 539 special education students were “probably incorrect and should instead have been classified as dropouts.”

That fully 20% of the special education sample was incorrectly identified as discharged would lower this groups abysmal graduation rate even further to between 8.9 and 9.3 percent, compared to 9.7 percent reported by DoE.

The OSC concludes: “When we statistically projected the results of our sample to the entire [general education] cohort, we found that the correct graduation rate for the cohort was probably between 62.9 and 63.6 percent, rather than the 65.5 percent reported by DoE. “

Yet as the DOE itself notes; the official overall graduation rate for the class of 2008, according to SED guidelines , was really 56.4%, not 65.5%, so it would have been better for the OSC to provide an estimate of how much lower the actual graduation rate would have likely been, with all students included.

The OSC statement that since the city’s graduation rate was likely less than 5 percentage points lower than originally claimed means that the reported graduation rate was “generally accurate” and that errors “would not negate the upward trends in graduation rates in recent years” is puzzling, since reported increases have only been about 2-3% per year, for general education students, and among special education students much less, so an error rate of 2-3%, as the OSC found, would be about the same as the reported increases.

In any event, a 15-20% error rate in discharges remains very high. This high rate of errors reflects DOE’s lack of proper oversight or any accountability mechanisms to verify that discharges are properly reported at the school level. In addition, as the audit pointed out, some of these errors are related to the DOE’s failure to align its discharge guidelines to those of the state, by counting students who have transferred to non-approved GED programs (outside DOE) as discharges instead of dropouts.

Some important questions remain unanswered:

There remains no explanation as to why the discharge rate of students in their first year of high school has doubled under this administration, as our report noted. There also is no explanation as to why so many of the students reported as discharged are the most at-risk students, including those who are male, ELL, Hispanic and/or African-American, if these figures are more or less accurate.

I urge the DOE to agree to clear up some of these mysteries, by regularly reporting discharges, disaggregated by age, code, special education status, and demographic background, as a recently introduced City Council bill would require, though the DOE has expressed its opposition to such reporting at Council hearings. If they have nothing to hide they will agree to report all this data on a regular basis.

The DOE should also release full graduation and discharge figures in their annual graduation reports, including data for special education students, which they have failed to do since we released our discharge report in April 2009, despite repeated requests.

The NYC Department of Education should report an annual graduation rate that includes all students, rather than continuing to report as its “official” rate just the general education cohort.

I remain concerned that students who have transferred to GED programs within the DOE system but do not receive GEDs should not be classified as discharges, because this artificially raises school graduation rates. Also that students who receive GEDs should not be reported as a regular graduates, because a GED is not a high school diploma, whether or not that conforms to state guidelines. Otherwise, with the pressure on schools to inflate their graduation rates, they will continue to have an incentive to push at-risk students into GED programs and the like.

Finally, the DOE should revise its excessively harsh and punitive accountability system, so as to minimize the incentive of schools to inflate their graduation rates either through increased discharges to GED programs and/or falsifying their reporting. Unless this occurs, schools will remain motivated to shade the truth, and “push out” or exclude our neediest students, because of fears that they will be closed down or have half their teachers fired if their graduation rates do not improve.

Here is one example, from the audit, of a student whom the DOE claimed was a legitimate discharge, because an attendance teacher said that he had confirmed with a neighbor that she had moved to the Dominican Republic, and that this “was later confirmed by the student directly.” (p.31) Yet as the OSC responded:

School officials discharged this student in January 2008 without proper documentation to support their discharge determination. School officials stated they made a home visit in January 2008 and were told by a neighbor that the family had moved to the Dominican Republic (DR). DoE officials provided a memo, dated May 1, 2010, in which the student confirmed having travelled to the DR on December 18, 2007. However, when we spoke to the student, she told us that she and her family had lived at the same address for many years and she had not been visited by any attendance teachers in January 2008. She did acknowledge that a DoE employee had visited her in May 2010 [presumably after the audit began]. She also told us she had traveled to the DR on December 18, 2007, to spend Christmas with her family. She said when she tried to attend school after her return to the USA, she was refused admittance because the school had already listed her as being discharged. Since school officials did not have the appropriate documentation required by SED, this student should have been classified as a dropout or should have remained on the school’s register and included in the calculation of the graduation rate for her cohort. (p. 47)

As long as schools continue to be punished for low graduation rates with the threat of closure, instead of provided with help to improve outcomes, they will continue to exclude students like this one. It is students like these who will suffer the most.

The "top" NYC high schools, with SAT scores, class sizes, and caveats

Check out the NY Post listing on the "top" 50 NYC high schools here: The top 10, 11 - 20, 21 - 40, 41 - 50. The data for all 400 plus high schools, including graduation rates, average SAT scores, etc. is available here.

The Post used the DOE progress reports, plus other relevant outcome data, to calculate this list. Like all such rankings, they have to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. In this case, the salt pile is immense, since so much of the DOE data are either unreliable or incomplete. For example, high school NYC graduation rates are often inflated, because they don't taken into account the numbers of discharged students, a huge loophole that many high schools use to boost their grad rates.

The Post says that the graduation rate in their listings reflects the percent of 9^th graders who end up graduating after four years plus a summer; but that is not true. Many high schools discharge significant numbers of students before they even reach the 12th grade, and many if most of these students end up dropouts, but are never counted as such.

Even in the case of one of top schools on the list (Bard), the reporter notes that “about 20 students in each class transfer out.” In the case of Bard, a highly selective school, they probably enroll in other regular high schools, but for other schools, discharged students often end up in alternative high schools, GED programs or sometimes nowhere at all. The DOE used to make the discharge data by each individual school available in their graduation reports, but no longer does, ever since Jennifer Jennings and I produced a report on the rising discharge figures under Bloomberg and Klein.

[Correction! Updated reports for the classes of 2008 and 2009 do contain discharge data by school, at least for general ed students; see Appendix B at the links above, which reveal egregiously high discharge rates at many schools, with twice the number of official "dropouts" in many cases. What the city no longer seems to report on are discharge rates for D 75 and self-contained students.]

The NY Post's listing does not include any data on the growing practice of credit recovery, which is another manner in which many schools are artificially inflating their grad rates, (see this article by the same Post reporter on the phenomenon.) The DOE refuses to release any data on credit recovery, so it is impossible to know just how widespread this practice is. The class size data are also are not fully reliable; and tend to underestimate the actual size of classes in many high schools, since inclusion (CTT) classes are commonly reported as two separate classes.

I also don't trust the college-going rates in the listings; and the SAT scores don't include information as to what percent of the class actually took the SATs. Finally, the ratings may reflect more than anything else the socio-economic background of the students rather than what the schools actually bring to the table.

Nevertheless, as parents have a right to see this information, I have now posted a spreadsheet with SAT average scores for every school, for 2008 and 2009, as well the schoolwide class size averages for 2009-10 school year, as calculated by the DOE (as opposed to class size averages in each school by grade and subject, that are available here.). Neither of these files are on the DOE website, as far as I know.