Police commanders in New York City face weekly "Compstat" meetings in which reams of crime statistics are scrutinized and commanders are grilled about trends in their precincts. As he prepares to leave office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani is pressing other city agencies to adopt similar programs to improve productivity, and Chancellor Harold Levy has announced that the New York City public school system's 32 district superintendents will face Compstat-like meetings beginning this year. While the school district's version of the meetings will not include "intense grillings ... with public upbraidings for those who cannot explain negative trends in their districts," the data, and the superintendents' responses to it, will factor heavily into their annual evaluations, and those with troubling data will have to attend private follow-up meetings with deputy chancellors. With the help of McKinsey & Company, the school district has developed new performance indicators, and the district has created mapping systems that allow the various indicators to be integrated and compared. The new data systems should make it easier not only to identify trends but also to explain them. The meetings with superintendents will be quarterly rather than weekly because most school data does not fluctuate from week to week. While Mayor Giuliani is reportedly disappointed that the meetings will not feature the same pressure-cooker atmosphere as those at Police Headquarters, the introduction of regular meetings at which performance indicators are analyzed and strategies for improvement outlined-and at which it is made clear to superintendents that keeping their jobs means producing results-are an important step toward real accountability.
"New York Schools Resist a City Hall Push to Use Data as the Police Do," by Abby Goodnough, New York Times, July 23, 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/23/nyregion/23SCHO.html?searchpv=day01