Find What Works: Schools
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docs/qa_reports/nysed/README.md

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NYSED cross-publisher reconciliation — chronic absenteeism

The first (iii-b) different-publisher check for NYC: NYSED's Report Card Database (ACC EM/HS Chronic Absenteeism, school-level, BEDS-keyed) vs the served values ingested from NYC DOE's End-of-Year file, joined per school via the deterministic BEDS→DBN rule (district + D75; charters need a crosswalk and were excluded here).

Contents:

  • FORMAT_NOTES.md — NYSED source scouting: files, tables, columns, years, coverage, BEDS structure, suppression (every claim sourced).
  • RECONCILIATION.md — the comparison itself: all comparable years (2018-19, 2020-21 → 2024-25) × grades 1–8 (EM) / 9–12 (HS); agreement stats, enrollment ratios, worst cases, hand-verified examples. §9 = the 2026-06-10 expansion (2020-21/2021-22/2022-23 panels, the COVID-era HS tail).
  • NARROWING.md — document review of the 2024-25 EM divergence: what is ruled out, what remains, next step.
  • stats.json — machine-readable headline numbers.

Status: produced by one-off reconciliation scripts ahead of the NYSED ingest (see docs/design/06); the verify/ harness gains a NYSED source connector in that PR, after which these regenerate like other qa_reports. Raw extracts live under data/reference/sources/nysed_src/<date>/ (gitignored; sha256 of each SRC zip recorded in the reports).

Headline: ten of twelve (year × grade-band) panels — all comparable years, 2018-19 and 2020-21 → 2024-25 — reconcile at the median (median per-school diff ≤0.4pp). The two failures: 2024-25 grades 1–8 (DOE falling vs NYSED rising on the same schools, numerator-side, weighted 29.0% vs 30.8%, median −1.84pp; no precursor — EM medians stay within ±0.4pp in every earlier panel; no documented definition change on either side explains it; cause not established; inquiry to NYSED drafted; treat 2024-25 EM chronic absenteeism as publisher-dependent until resolved) and 2022-23 grades 9–12 (median −0.60pp, only 47% within ±1pp, r 0.779). The 2022-23 HS failure is the visible edge of a broader COVID-era HS tail: 62/112/129 high schools sit >5pp below NYSED in 2020-21/2021-22/2022-23 on largely byte-identical denominators — publisher-level, hidden by median-based summaries; cause not established (RECONCILIATION.md §9; ledger A.20).