Archived: NYC School District Profiles

American Community Survey 
The ACS is an annual survey that collects data similar to those formerly collected by the census long form. As with the long form, the ACS covers only a sample of individuals and housing units. However, the ACS uses a smaller sample: the long form covers one out of every six housing units while the ACS only covers one in 40 housing units each year. Our report primarily utilizes the five-year estimates for 2005-9 and 2013-17 and the one-year estimates for Figures 2A and 2B. Most of the indicators from the ACS in this report are derived from pre-compiled summary tables reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.

NYCDOE Demographic Snapshot 2013-2018 
The demographic snapshots are made public by the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and provide data on annual enrollment at the citywide, borough, district, and school levels. Enrollment data are broken down by student characteristics including disability status, ELL status, race/ ethnicity, and gender. Enrollment counts for traditional public schools are based on the October 31 Audited Register for each school year. Charter schools are required to submit enrollment as of BEDS Day, the first Wednesday in October, to the New York State Department of Education.

NYSED Report Card Database 
This database is made publicly available by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) and contains annual assessment data for the state as well as by county, Need to Resource Capacity group, district, public school, and charter school. Data in the report cards are submitted by local school district officials by the reporting deadline. School superintendents and charter school principals are provided with an opportunity to review verification reports of data and make data corrections until the reporting deadline. We primarily utilize this database for charter school enrollment data prior to the 2013-14 school year.

School-Level Master File 1996-2016 
The School-Level Master File (SCHMA) is a dataset developed by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools at New York University (www.ranycs.org). To create the file, they compiled publicly available data from the NYCDOE and the U.S. Department of Education. The result is a consistent, accessible document that can be used to investigate characteristics of individual New York City schools or groups of schools and how they have changed over time. The Research Alliance takes no responsibility for potential errors in the dataset or the analysis. The opinions expressed in this report do not represent the views of the Research Alliance for NYC Schools or the institutions that posted the original publicly available data. We primarily utilize this database for traditional public school enrollment data from the 2005-06 school year to the 2015-16 school year.

Charter Schools
In New York State, charter schools are public schools operated independently by nonprofit or for-profit organizations. They generally receive per-pupil funding and must meet the same academic accountability measures as other public schools. However, charter schools are exempt from many of the requirements regarding hiring, operations, and curriculum imposed on other public schools by state and local school boards or the Department of Education.

Traditional Public Schools 
In this report, traditional public schools are non-charter, public schools operated by the NYCDOE.

Elementary School Zones (Attendance Zones)
School attendance zones outline where children within a particular geographic boundary will attend public elementary school. In New York City, kindergarteners are given priority within the school choice application process for their assigned, zoned school based on their address. However, if schools are over-enrolled, children may be placed in a nearby neighborhood school. The city’s boroughs are divided into 32 geographic school districts. Within 29 of the 32 districts, elementary schools are assigned to geographic zones that usually span several blocks. The remaining three have open-choice policies.

Isolation/Exposure Index 
Used extensively in both the research on schools and neighborhoods, these indices report, for the average person in a group, the percent of the population in a school or neighborhood that is of the same group (isolation index) or of a different group (exposure index). Mathematically, the isolation index of group x is as follows:

Where n is the number of areas (schools or neighborhoods) in the city, xi is the population of group x in area i, ti is the total population of area i, and X is the sum of all xi.

Mathematically, the exposure index of group x to group y is as follows:

Where yi is the population of group y in area i.

Elementary School Zone Residential Population 
To aggregate the ACS five-year racial/ethnic group estimates from 2005-9 and 2013-17 to elementary school attendance zone boundaries, we relied on areal interpolation. Areal interpolation is a geostatistical (or spatial) interpolation technique that extends kriging theory- an estimation method that gives unbiased linear estimates of point values with minimum variance- to data averaged or aggregated over polygons. Predictions and standard errors can be made for all points within and between the input polygons, and predictions (along with standard errors) can then be reaggregated back to a new set of polygons. This methodology was chosen because of the geographic levels of data available in the American Community Survey for racial/ethnic groups separated out by Hispanic ethnicity. We utilized the ArcGIS geostatistical analyst to execute the areal interpolation models.