Faking Class Size

The New York City Dept. of Education has released class size data. Hmm. I should say, heavily adjusted class size data. Edwize was happy. They should have known better.

The high school numbers were arrived at by cheating. They excluded lots and lots of classes.

Each school locally designated courses as “core” or not. The general guidelines were that any course that is used for graduation would be core, everything else would not be.

Which categories are excluded? Foreign Language is the biggest category. Then Music, Art.

Individual classes are excluded. Which? In most schools, anything that is not part of the standard graduation sequence. Which means lots and lots of things. And different things in different schools.

In math, any advanced courses? Probably excluded. Precalculus? Probably excluded. Calculus? Probably excluded. Statistics? Probably excluded. Any lower-level post Math A courses (eg, Intermediate Algebra)? Probably excluded. (note that these courses help many kids earn their 5th and 6th credit towards graduation).

English is worse. The guidelines make clear that electives should be excluded. But – “The Modern American Novel” – typical class that could count for elective credit? Probably excluded. And some kids are taking it as an elective, and it is the 8th needed English credit for others. Journalism? Ditto.

And the core/not core designation was made in each individual school, following these vague guidelines.

So how many classes were counted, how many were excluded? That piece of data they are not sharing.