“When you’ve been in the school and know the culture of the school, and this school has been labeled persistently dangerous?” he said. “You think, ‘That’s crazy.’”

But some critics now wonder if the system has moved too far in the other direction. Among them is Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter-school group that is suing New York City for what it says are violent conditions in city schools. Jeremiah Kittredge, the chief executive of the organization said that by removing and collapsing categories, the state would give families less information about what’s going on in schools, not more. Ms. Rider of the State Education Department said New York would still make some of that information available in subcategories.

Image John B. King Jr., the United States secretary of education. He criticized the old Violent and Disruptive Incident Reporting system when he was education commissioner in New York. Credit... Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

The changes do not remove what many see as the most fundamental problem: Vadir is based on self-reported information, and given that the reporting has consequences, school administrators might have an interest in keeping certain episodes to themselves.

Jonathan Burman, a spokesman for the State Education Department, did not address that issue directly but said in an email: “It is critical that everyone has a clear and consistent way to track and compare the level of safety in every school. The department’s goal is to ensure that the most accurate school safety data possible gets reported.”

Johanna Miller, the advocacy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, was a member of a task force that worked on the new regulations. She said the group “worked a lot with the language of the categories so it matched up better with the language of school discipline, rather than what it was before, which was penal code language.”

For example, “assault with physical injury” and “assault with serious physical injury” will now become a single category, called “physical injury.” Categories like “reckless endangerment” will disappear.