This web page will allow you to construct a custom report from the data in New York State School Report Card Database. To my knowledge this is the first web site to allow dynamic report generation of the New York State School Report Card Data. This data was freely obtained from the New York State Education Department Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education. The database is publicly available at http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/repcrd2004/database/guide.shtml.

I highly suggest that you view the below Word document that comes packaged with the database. I do not attempt to explain the data as this document already provides explanations. If you have problems or get errors generating a report please let me know. If you have questions regarding the information in a report I suggest you refer to the Word document explaining the data or contact the Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education.

As of January 2006, this is the most recent data available from the State. This database was released in March of 2005 and I will update my site to reflect newer data when it becomes available. Depending on the table, the data ranges from 1997 through 2004. For all tables where multiple years are available, currently only the 2004 data is accessible using this report writer.

You can generate either district level or school level reports using this report writer (data rows will either be districts or schools). By default the report writer generates district level reports but this is altered by the selection of a field in a table that contains school level data.

At each screen you should choose the ‘Next’ or ‘Done’ button to move to the next screen. At any time you can go back and change your previous choices using the ‘Previous’ button. The ‘Reset’ button will return you to this screen and reset all of your selections. Screen 5 will generate and show you the report based on your selections.

New York State provided the original database in a Microsoft Access 97 (Jet 3.0) format. I used a Visual Basic program to create a series of mySQL statements that were used to build the mySQL database on the web server used in this web site. No modifications or changes were to the data as part of this conversion. I did make a change to the field name “Gen'l Ed Tot Expenditures” by removing the apostrophe between the ‘n’ and ‘l’. The apostrophe was causing SQL errors and it was easier to remove it rather than fix the SQL code.

The script that powers the search is written in php. I wrote the script using my limited knowledge of php and my knowledge of Microsoft Access and SQL server.

I would really like to hear feedback from anyone visiting this page and generating a report.