The city’s public school system made progress on all fronts last year, from higher attendance to smaller class sizes to sharp reductions in serious crime, according to figures released yesterday.
The Mayor’s Management Report – a semiannual report card rating the performance of all city agencies – found fewer students per class on average in every grade but one between kindergarten and ninth from July 1 to Oct. 31 compared to the same period in 2006.
The report can now be accessed online as part of a new database called the Citywide Performance Reporting, or CPR, also unveiled yesterday.
New Yorkers can go to the city’s Web site at nyc.gov and get information on crime and fire statistics and check how well city agencies are performing.
The news on schools was mostly positive. There was only one grade in which there was no improvement on class size – second – which stayed flat, with an average of 21.2 students.
The fifth grade experienced the biggest drop, from 25.1 to 24.1 students.
Attendance in all grades crept up from 90.5 to 90.8 percent, and serious crimes fell sharply, from 348 to 242.
Mayor Bloomberg cited the improvements as evidence of the strides made by most city agencies.
“All the metrics say the city’s going in the right direction,” he said.
Leonie Haimson, director of the advocacy group Class Size Matters, questioned whether the Department of Education’s figures were valid.
“Every single year, the class-size data they report in the Mayor’s Management Report differs radically from the class-size data they report to the City Council,” she said.
Haimson also pointed out that the improvements in some grades were miniscule and below targets set by the school system.
A schools spokeswoman, Debra Wexler, responded that the figures delivered to the council and the ones in the mayor’s report were identical.
Wexler also said class-size targets were set for the end of the school year, months away, and are still within reach.
Bloomberg also trumpeted the CPR database, saying the newly available online information was designed to make it harder for city agencies to hide data.
“It becomes much more difficult to obfuscate or out-and-out lie,” he said during a visit to PS/IS 180 in Harlem, where the CPR was shown off.
Of the 500 performance measures for city agencies available on the Web site, 257 were rated as improved, 80 declined by 10 percent or less, 44 dropped by more than 10 percent, and the rest were unchanged.
Despite the gush of good news, there were some persistent problems: The number of city syphilis cases increased 56 percent, from 190 to 296. Noise complaints soared 33 percent, from 15,076 to 19,998.