New York City’s schools got new, redesigned report cards on Tuesday.
For the second time since the de Blasio administration scrapped the A-F letter grades once assigned to schools, the city released a set of parent-friendly school guides and deeper data dives for most of its 1,800 schools. [Look up your school’s data here.]
This year’s school guides include more data than last year’s did, and line up with Chancellor Fariña’s new school “framework” — with measurements for trust and collaboration appearing alongside metrics of academic success. P.S. 15 on the Lower East Side, for example, exceeded the city’s target for school leadership but is only approaching its target for student achievement.
Those targets are new this year, and reflect city officials’ latest answer to a tricky question: How do you measure and reward a school for its progress, while also giving parents a clear sense of whether students are passing state tests or are ready for college?
The Bloomberg-era letter grades were often criticized for their focus on progress, leaving some high-performing schools with low letter grades and some low-scoring schools with As and confusing parents. Last year’s reports, the first released by the de Blasio administration, nixed the grades. In their place were descriptors based on in-person “quality reviews,” among other metrics.
City officials say the new targets are here to stay, and are meant to be realistic goals for schools to meet each year.
For parents glancing at the results, the reports are also generous: Only four high schools are labeled as not meeting their targets for student achievement, though another 106 fell short and are labeled “approaching target.” Just two high schools are labeled as not meeting their targets for rigorous instruction.
Seven of the 94 schools in the city’s turnaround program met or exceeded their targets in all categories, including student achievement.
The goals also vary widely. The selective Millennium High School needed a 93 percent four-year graduation rate to meet its target (seven points lower than its actual 100 percent graduation rate), while the long-struggling Dewitt Clinton High School would have needed 67 percent (a full 22 points higher than its 45 percent graduation rate).
The variation comes from the fact that each school got its targets based mostly on a group of peer schools with similar demographics, but also based on citywide averages.
“The Snapshots do a good job translating a large amount of school data into language that is meaningful to parents,” said Nicole Mader, the education policy analyst at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “But it would be very hard to use these Snapshots to compare multiple school options available to their children.”
Next year, the city is ditching peer schools altogether in favor of comparisons between each school’s individual students based on grade level and demographics. Lisa Merrill, a research associate at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools who works with school survey data, said that will provide more sophisticated comparisons.
Those peer comparisons already appear on this year’s reports below prominent statistics, including a school’s pass rate on state tests and its graduation rate. But critics said the city’s attempts to translate the data into understandable graphics — with Boys and Girls High School, which has a low graduation rate, earning two out of four bars for student achievement — are misleading.
“The administration would rather give parents a falsely rosy picture than admit schools are not performing,” StudentsFirstNY’s executive director Jenny Sedlis said.
Others, including Mader, noted that presenting school data always involves trade-offs.
The snapshots, she said, are a fair way to account for challenges each school faces while pushing them to do better. The question is whether parents will dig deep enough to utilize them.
“While I applaud the administration’s desire to move away from one summary grade or statistic for each school,” Mader said, “I worry that parents who are pressed for time or overwhelmed with options are going to ignore most of what this Snapshot is offering them, focusing on one number like test scores instead.”