DelMundo for News

If there’s one thing The Wire has taught us, it’s that stats can be “juked,” or otherwise manipulated to make them appear far better than they are in reality. From what we can tell from the Post’s and the Daily News’s look at Bloomberg’s “progress” on education today, there’s definitely some juking going on.

First, there’s that editorial in the Post called, “An Avalanche of A’s,” which questions the grading system used to measure the progress of students and hold principals accountable for it. They write:

Of the thousand-plus schools graded, nearly 900, or 85 percent, scored an A — up from fewer than 400 last year.

A mere 27 received C’s, D’s or F’s.

We know the schools are improving, but that’s a little ridiculous…

… And what does a top grade even mean, if nearly every school in the system “earns” one?

Indeed, as The Post’s Yoav Gonen reports today, the list of top-ranked schools includes four of the eight just added to the state’s “persistently dangerous” list.

Huh?

What’s really going on here is unclear. The formula that determines school grades is enormously complex, but it relies heavily on students’ progress on state tests. If those are getting watered down, school grades would jump unbidden.

DOE officials admit they’d rather have fewer A’s — so as to better distinguish improving and worsening schools.

Glad to hear that — because as it stands now, the grades convey nearly no useful information whatsoever.

Then there’s Juan Gonzalez’s story in the Daily News, “A closer look at Mayor Bloomberg’s math on new school construction,” which shows how Mayor Bloomberg is inflating the numbers of “new school buildings” opened in the past year — numbers Bloomberg uses to boast that it “represent[s] the most-ever new classroom seats to come on line in a two-year period since the School Construction Authority was created in 1988.” Gonzalez reports:

Let’s start with the Jonas Bronck Academy in the Bronx. It’s a 238-student middle school that originally opened back in 2005 at a temporary location. The so-called “new” building is actually a few floors of rented space at an old office complex on Fordham Road. The DOE has agreed to pay Acadia Partners, the building’s owners, nearly $40 million for a 20-year lease on the space, plus an additional $11.5 million for renovations.

The Bronck Academy’s startling price tag doesn’t compare, however, to the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women. The DOE will house that “new” school for 500 students in rented space at 26 Broadway, a commercial office building in lower Manhattan’s Financial District.

You, the taxpayer, will pay - take a deep breath - $191 million over 30 years for the new school’s lease, making this perhaps the most expensive school building in the city’s history.

At the end of the 30 years, the city will own nothing, because it’s just renting. But The Chetrit Group, owners of the building, will have done very well.

And then there’s this:

According to Leonie Haimson, head of the parent group Class Size Matters, the city created far more new classroom seats during the last six years of the Giuliani administration then during all of the Bloomberg era.

During three of those years, Giuliani created an average of 19,000 new seats. Under Bloomberg, the city has created more than 14,000 seats only once, in 2005, and school overcrowding continues to grow.

Gabe Pressman agrees:

There’s an old saying that figures don’t lie but liars can figure.

We’re sure that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein are honorable men, but we would urge them to stop peddling phony statistics. The children and their parents deserve better.