The New York Times

July 2, 2008

Students, Teachers and Parents Weigh In on State of the Schools

By JENNIFER MEDINA

For the second year in a row, a vast majority of New York City parents, teachers and students who responded to a Department of Education survey said they were satisfied with their schools, with more teachers saying their schools maintain order and make it a priority to help students achieve.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Tuesday that more than 800,000 people responded to this year’s survey, which cost $2 million to conduct. The results of the survey account for 10 percent of the letter grades the city assigns to individual schools, with test scores and attendance making up the rest.

“I think for the first time a major school system has really listened to the parents, listened to the teachers, listened to the principals, listened to the students and tried to find out what they really say, rather than have the arrogance to think we know, ” the mayor said.

This the second year the city has conducted the survey of nearly 1.5 million parents, teachers and students. One encouraging finding was that more students reported feeling safe in hallways, bathrooms, and locker rooms at their school: 72 percent this year compared with 68 percent last year.

There were some signs of trouble and dissatisfaction, however. More than a third of middle and high school students said getting good grades did not earn the respect of other students, and nearly a quarter of parents named smaller classes as the improvement they most wanted. Both findings echo the results of last year’s survey. But among teachers, 82 percent of those who responded to the voluntary survey said that their schools made it a priority to help students achieve their learning goals, up from 73 percent last year. And nearly three-quarters said that their schools maintained order and discipline, up from 64 percent last year.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that the survey results reinforced the idea that student-teacher interaction was the most important aspect of schools.

Ninety-four percent of the 347,829 parents who responded to the survey said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their child’s teacher, and 86 percent said the teachers gave “helpful comments on homework, class work and tests.”

“The fact that parents think so highly of their children’s teachers also indicates how selfless our educators are,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They give their all despite feeling that the central administration isn’t listening to their concerns.”

Last week, the teachers’ union released the results of its own survey, which showed that 82 percent of those responding said they believed Mr. Klein did not have “confidence of the expertise of his educators.”

Education Department officials sharply criticized the union’s methodology, saying that the survey asked leading questions at a time when the union was also running advertisements criticizing the department.

The participation in the city’s survey increased significantly from last year, when 587,000 people responded, and included 48,002 teachers — a 61 percent response rate — and 410,708 students, a 78 percent response rate. Most students filled out the surveys in class, and principals across the city pushed to increase the parent participation, which was 40 percent this year, up from 26 percent last year.

Mary Ellen Kociszewski, principal of the High School for Applied Communication in Long Island City, Queens, where the survey results were released on Tuesday, said she asked parents to fill out surveys when they came to school for teacher conferences and to pick up report cards.

James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, who oversaw the survey, said that over all, parents of elementary school students had a higher response rate than those of older children, as they did last year. He said the response rate increased at so-called high-need schools, which have significant numbers of poor, minority and special education students.