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These guys are in charge of teaching your kids math?
The state Education Department failed to document roughly 20,000 violent incidents that had been reported by city schools in 2010 — sending the false signal that schools had suddenly become much safer, The Post has learned.
The mind-boggling math miscue led state Education officials to post data on their Web site showing a miraculous 36 percent drop in the number of serious school incidents between 2009 and 2010 — from about 61,000 to 39,000 in just one year.
The data count crimes like robbery, assault and theft, as well as more typical schoolyard behavior like altercations and bullying.
The sloppy summation means state officials also may have low-balled the number of city schools with numbers high enough to meet the definition of “persistently dangerous” — a label that triggers major interventions and allows students to transfer out.
Just nine city schools were labeled unsafe this year — the lowest number since the criteria for identifying them changed in 2005. The number of out-of-control schools peaked at 25 in 2007.
Despite having the data in their hands for more than a year, state officials didn’t notice their fuzzy math until questioned by The Post.
The erroneous figures had been quietly uploaded to the department’s Web site last month, with no public announcement.
“Clearly, we’ve made a data error and have posted improperly,” said department spokesman Tom Dunn, who added that a review was under way.
City DOE officials said they had questioned the state’s reading of the data as early as June but that those concerns had been rebuffed.
Yet a quick glance shows ridiculously large reductions in the number of incidents at dozens of city schools over one year — which would have raised red flags for anyone who bothered to look.
Among the implausible cases was John Bowne HS in Flushing, which registered 509 serious incidents among its more than 3,000 students in 2009 — including 61 minor altercations, 11 thefts and seven sexual offenses.
Somehow, the mammoth Queens high school compiled just three incidents for the entire 2010 year.
JHS 162, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, saw a similarly staggering drop in reported incidents — plummeting from 369 serious disruptions in 2009 to just one in 2010.
“I don’t think so,” one seventh-grader from the Brooklyn middle school said of the single incident. “There is a lot of fighting.”
The inaccurate data also indicated the number of city schools reporting five incidents or less had doubled between 2009 and 2010 — from 333 to 676 schools.