By Kate Pastor

The city Department of Education recently released its second annual “Arts in School” report, part of its effort to provide greater accountability for arts education.

That means the newest document provides the first year-to-year comparison of arts education in the city’s public schools. Right?

Not according to some local principals who report the information is sometimes distorted or even just downright wrong.

PS 81 Principal Melodie Mashel said her school’s report was mixed up with another school’s last year. When she reported the problem to the DOE, the information was corrected, but this year’s report also came back with errors.

According to the parent coordinator there, Nina Velazquez, the report shows that pre-kindergarten students got dance and music instruction, but the school has no pre- K classes. She also said that, “according to this, only kids in fourth grade got art but that’s not correct.”

IN-Tech Academy, MS/HS 368 Principal Rose Fairweather- Clunie said she saw errors glaring back at her in this year’s report, too.

“There’s information that’s not correct in here,” she said, disputing the report’s findings that 47 percent of seventh-graders and 38 percent of eighthgraders participated in arts programs. Furthermore, she said that all of the children who graduated from the school in June 2008 took at least one halfunit in an arts discipline and a second half-unit in another over the course of seventh and eighth grade, not the 86 percent mentioned in the report.

Although her assistant principal filled out the report’s questionnaire, she said the questions she answered asked for a yes or no response, and the DOE then calculated percentages in error.

The report had “many discrepancies,” she said.

For other principals, the problem was not imprecision, it was the way the questions were asked.

The “Arts in School” report is based on a voluntary survey filled out by principals about art in their schools, but its questions do not necessarily take into account the full range of explanations of how arts education is conducted.