Audit Gives Limited Nod to Reports on Schools

The Department of Education has been the most frequent target of audits by City Comptroller John C. Liu. He has completed three of them since winning election in 2009 and has nine more under way, focusing on subjects like online learning and the $80 million database that tracks students’ academic records, which has been widely criticized as not living up to its promise.

But the most recent audit, released on Sunday, offered more good than bad news about the high school progress reports, which are used to determine schools that will be closed or restructured.

The audit said the numbers in the reports — like graduation rates, credit accumulation and passing rates on Regents exams — are accurate to the extent that they match the numbers in the databases from which they are drawn. One problem, the audit says, is that they are not always easy to understand.

The progress reports measure improvement based on how schools with similar demographics fare against one another, assigning them grades from A through F. But because the way the grades are calculated has changed several times, it is hard to use the reports to compare a school’s progress from year to year or to determine if the grades accurately reflect shifts in performance over time.

“It’s troubling that a system that is used to decide school closings leaves teachers and students confused about what they need to do to improve” a failing school, Mr. Liu said in a statement.

The reports are, however, a reliable measure of comparison among peer schools in a single year, the audit concludes. In its response, the Education Department says that is exactly what they are supposed to do.

“The department adjusts the methodology of the progress reports periodically to account for changes in school performance, new information and new ideas about how to measure school quality, all in order to produce the best possible instrument for the current year,” the school system’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, wrote in a letter to the comptroller’s office.

One of the new metrics that will be used to calculate a school’s grade, to be introduced in the fall, is how well the school prepares its students for college, Mr. Polakow-Suransky said in an interview. “If you’re going to make improvements” in the reports, he added, “you have to make some changes, and what that means is that you have to look at them in the year they’re published.”

The audit did not set out to assess the accuracy of statistics like graduation rates and Regents scores, which are reported by the schools to the Education Department, despite rising concerns that some schools might be manipulating the numbers to enhance their performance. The department announced in February that the task would be undertaken by its general auditor, who will look first at about 60 high schools whose data show suspicious patterns.

Some of these numbers have already been reviewed by previous city and state audits, but no serious anomalies have been uncovered.

Mr. Liu undertook the effort shortly after education officials voted to close 19 schools early last year, and it took his auditors roughly 14 months to pore through the records, including four years’ worth of progress reports and manuals for the computer programs that store things like students’ grades, attendance records and test scores.

The audit focused on 10 high schools in the five boroughs, including three schools that had been slated for closing. It issued several recommendations, most of which the department said it would consider carrying out. They include submitting screen shots whenever student records are changed during the period in which they are being verified, and ensuring that the records are tracked and retained by the schools.