With all the talk of charter schools lately, I decided to start exploring public school data for NYC. For today’s study, I’m not going to go the whole “who has higher test scores” route. That has been studied over and over again. Rather, I want to explore parental involvement and views of charter schools vs. public schools.

So I turned to NYC Open Data. NYC releases annual surveys of students, parents and teachers in its schools, measuring academic expectations, safety & respect, and other areas. "Survey results provide insight into a school’s learning environment and contribute a measure of diversification that goes beyond test scores" according to the city. I figured if parents were more involved in charter school student’s educations, these surveys might show it… To the data!

Survey Response Rates:

One way to measure engagement is to see what percent of people responded to mailed surveys about the school. If you can’t be bothered to fill out a survey to help with your child’s schooling, you could argue that you are less engaged.

The chart shows the average survey response rate for schools, broken down by public and charter school:

What we see is that for all categories, parents, teachers and students, the response rate is higher at charter schools. However, only the differences in the parents category hold up to significance testing (at the 99% confidence level using t-tests for all you stats nerds). So we can say, with statistical significance:

Charter school parents are more likely to respond to the annual school surveys than their public school counterparts.

In fact they are about 12% more likely, according to these numbers.

Academic Expectation Scores:

The Academic Expectation portion of the survey measures expectations for the quality of the academic experience at a school. Parents, teachers and students are surveyed each year, and the results, on a scale of 1-10, for 2013 are below:

Once again, we see no significant difference in student and parent academic expectations between charter schools and public schools. However, once again, the different between parents views of charter and public schools is significant at the 99% level. So we can conclude:

Charter school parents have higher academic expectation from their children’s schools than public school parents.

It’s fascinating to see that teachers and students don’t share that belief, given that they are the ones in school every day.

Safety and Respect:

The Safety and Respect scores measure how safe of an environment the respondents think the school provides, on scale of 1-10. Results are below:

From a student’s perspective, we see no significant difference between safety and respect scores for charter schools and public schools. However, we see that both charter school teachers and charter school parents have higher safety and respect expectations than their public school counterparts. So we can say, with 99% confidence, the following:

Charter school parents give higher safety and respect scores to their children’s schools than public school parents.

Conclusion:

These numbers struck me two ways. First, note that in all three of my measures, (1) response rate, (2) academic expectations, and (3) safety & respect, the difference between public and charter schools is strongest amongst parents.

Second, it’s fascinating to see that students scores do not differ meaningfully in any of these three measures across the two types of schools. One would guess that you could register some difference in student expectations, given all the programming at charter schools. But that seems not to be the case. It’s also interesting that teacher’s academic expectation scores are on average the same between charter and public schools.

These surveys obviously are only a tiny piece of the charter school puzzle. But anytime I can use open data to look at our city in a new way, I’m in.

Data: Survey,

Tools: IPython, Excel

Methodology: Each school has equal weight in score. (I could have weighted by number of respondents too, but that would give large schools more weight) District 75 schools excluded

