NYC goes back to school: Attendance numbers show overall ramp-up

Monday September 30, 2013

I've been archiving (and tweeting) NYCDOE attendance numbers since last spring, so this has been the first Fall that I've archived. I was interested to see what the start of the school year looks like. As I sort of guessed, there is a clear "ramp up" in the system overall, in addition to the usual weekly pattern:

But there's also huge variability; schools are all over the place when it comes to attendance:

And schools behave very differently - for example, Stuyvesant doesn't seem to follow the overall trend at all:

I suspect that attendance patterns provide some information about school performance which is beyond just raw average attendance for a school. As a first guess, perhaps a more prominent "ramp-up" is associated with lower academic performance as measured by standardized tests. I think this could be interesting to investigate.

It would be great if more people took a look at these attendance numbers, and also if we could get more similar data from other school systems!

This post was originally hosted elsewhere.