Students Weigh in on School Issues

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Kusha Navadar. I'm filling in for Brian. Now we'll look at the results of this year's New York City School Survey. The annual questionnaire, the Department of Education sends to students, parents and teachers every spring.
This year, more than 357,000 middle and high school students filled it out. They had a lot to say.
Were you often bored in class last year? More than half said yes. Were you often academically challenged? About four in 10 said only in some or even in none of their classes. And is vaping common at school? More than a third said yes. The survey itself got a makeover this year too. There are fewer questions, plainer language, and some things the city has never asked students before. Joining me now to break it all down is Cayla Bamberger, Education and Youth Issues Reporter for the New York Daily News. Cayla, welcome to WNYC.

**Cayla Bamberger** (1:13)
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

**Kusha Navadar** (1:15)
So before we get into what students said, tell us about the survey. Who takes it?

**Cayla Bamberger** (1:21)
Sure.
So every year, the New York City public schools ask families, teachers, staff of students in grades 3K through 12 to fill out the survey. Then in addition to that, there's a student facing survey and that's just going to some of the older students. So we're talking middle school and up grades 6 through 12 So the survey is designed to collect important information about each school. The results we're going to talk about today for the most part, are going to be the city-wide results. But just so your listeners know, this is also going out for each school district, each principal. So there are real opportunities to dig into this data to learn more about your school and about the school system at large.

**Kusha Navadar** (2:05)
What did the Department of Education change about it this year?

**Cayla Bamberger** (2:09)
Sure. So the main changes to the survey this year really happened at that student facing survey. So last summer, they started this process of substantially revising the student survey. Like you said in the intro, it was intended to simplify the language, just shorten the number of questions.
So that's great if it's going to get more accurate student responses, but unfortunately, what that means for us as the public is it's harder to compare the data year over year to see how those trends are changing.
So when this process started, education officials asked schools, what questions should we keep? Should we delete? Should we revise? They got more than 300 responses from schools during that process, met with about 22 students individually. So just as an example, the type of question that might have changed was, whereas the last survey might have asked, in how many of your classes are you encouraged to work in small groups? This time it's saying just how many of your classes do you work in small groups to meet students where they are?

**Kusha Navadar** (3:20)
How hard does it make it to compare year over year with those syntax changes and I guess framing generally?

**Cayla Bamberger** (3:25)
Yeah. I mean, the education officials just really tell you not to do it.
There are some questions that are similar enough that maybe we can draw inferences, but nothing that I would go out on a limb and attach my name to because of those changes. Then some questions are new entirely. Then there's really no precedent to compare it back in time too. But this is going to be a new benchmark going forward. This is data that will continue to look at year after year, as these questions continue to roll through.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:00)
If the drawback of the change is the statistical inference that you can get, or at least the confidence that you can have from that statistical inference, is the upside, the reason that they would be okay with that, just making it more approachable for kids? What's the upside for them?

**Cayla Bamberger** (4:18)
Yeah, exactly. Part of it is just simply that they wanted more students to respond. It looks like it worked. As you mentioned in the intro, some 357,000 students responded to this survey. That's a three percentage point increase from the year before.
It was important to do, but it does mean that for purposes of our conversation today, we're looking at a snapshot of a moment in time rather than trends changing over time.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:50)
Yeah. When you're talking about a 3 percent increase on hundreds of thousands of students, that's a lot of extra students that you have participating in that, which I think is important.