Discussione:Consiglio di amministrazione della pubblica istruzione della Città di New York

Notability

This school district's notability should be well-established. It is the largest school district in the United States. It operates public schools in New York City, which is the largest city in the U.S. and the most influential. There are many reliable sources about the district's operations.

It is a good point to raise "why doesn't Mexico City/London/etc have an article like this?" - In the U.S. and Canada education systems work differently. Areas have "en:school districts" (see en:School districts in the United States) which control public schools in a local area, hire teachers, build new schools, set education policy, etc. While New York City's school district is controlled by the city government, many school districts are independent of municipal governments and answer directly to the U.S. state, and have the ability to tax households like a city would.

• At en:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools/Article_guidelines#Notability: "Non-notable school articles are generally redirected to the locality article or, for US schools, the school district article if available."

WhisperToMe (msg) 08:31, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

why should we do have an article about a big office? it's plenty of them everywhere in the world! and we should speak italian here, please! --Rago (msg) 08:46, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

Unfortunately I do not know enough Italian to hold this discussion in that language (if you want I can try using some Spanish which is in the same language family), but I have made attempts to contact Wikipedians who speak in Italian who deal with USA articles. While government agencies (I assume "big office" means a government agency) can be frustrating, they are often very notable subjects and should be documented. Until recently many Italian children attended schools operated by this agency (immigration from Italy has decreased) WhisperToMe (msg) 08:58, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

per me è da cancellare in C3 perché espressioni come "è quell'ufficio del governo", "Per la sua immensa dimensione" o "il potente sistema informativo" non mi sembrano certo italiane (sono babelfishate?). --valepert 09:07, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

• The original author is Utente:Rdocb who is an Italian speaker. This is the article in 2009. WhisperToMe (msg) 09:23, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)
  • I E-mailed Rdocb, who has not edited since 2011. I asked him to participate in this discussion. WhisperToMe (msg) 09:35, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

Personalmente trovo la voce poco utile, ma non vedo problemi nell'averla. E se ne avessimo una analoga per (esempio) Pechino, mi andrebbe bene anche quella. I personally find the article not very useful, but I wouldn't mind keeping it. And if we'll get a similar one about (let's say) Beijing, I wouldn't mind keeping that too. --Paginazero - Ø 09:50, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

There can be articles about individual Beijing schools (I have started some on the English and Chinese Wikipedias myself). Rdocb also started Los Angeles Unified School District which is in Los Angeles. Unlike the New York district, the Los Angeles district is not a part of the city government. WhisperToMe (msg) 09:53, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

Also, what do you believe would make this article more useful? If you want sources or references I can get them. WhisperToMe (msg) 09:58, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

of course we need sources, they are what constitutes notability, as long as they are serious sources :-)

We have many articles here about public institutions, which sometimes deal with less important subjects, so I'm not "against" this one, just like Paginazero isn't. However, the article itself - in its current version - doesn't show reasons for presuming the notability we are talking about. At a first and fast sight, I found on the web lots of politically oriented sources: well, these are not what we truly need here, since most of us don't vote in NYC. So thank you in advance for helping us in finding more academic sources, which certainly would encourage someone to let this article grow correctly :-) -- g · ℵ (msg) 10:39, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

You are welcome :) - I'm not sure if the Italian Wikipedia has an equivalent, but on EN the most prominent notability guideline is "GNG" (en:Wikipedia:GNG) which states "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article or stand-alone list." - Which means in general if one can find sufficient reliable sources for any topic, it is notable. There are also specific notability guidelines for certain topics. Anyway, I'll try to find five sources, perhaps mix books, journal articles, and/or news articles. WhisperToMe (msg) 16:05, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

A me tutto sommato effettivamente non pare un'istituzione piccolina, e se devo ricorrere al deprecato ragionamento per analogia, non ci sarà il Messico, ma siamo pieni di voci su enti italiani insignificanti che per flussi finanziari ed effetti sull'economia del paese non arrivano certo ai livelli della gestione dei cancellini di questo ente d'oltreoceano :-) Insomma, ci può stare, secondo me -- g · ℵ (msg) 10:39, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

Five sources available online from academic databases:

• Sawchuck, Stephen. "N.Y.C. must provide names with data." Education Week. Volume 30, Issue 17. January 19, 2011. p. 4. "The New York City Department of Education must include teachers' names in the performance-data reports it provides to news outlets to fulfill open-records requests, a New York state court ruled last week. The United Federation of Teachers had sued to redact teachers' names from such requests in New York, saying[...]" Available from Academic OneFile, Gale Cengage Learning, Gale document ID: GALE|A247974239.
• Carolan, Brian V. Institutional Pressures and Isomorphic Change. The Case of New York City's Department of Education. (academic journal article, see entry in ERIC) Education and Urban Society (ISSN 0013-1245). 2008, Volume 40, Issue 428. Originally published online on 23 October 2007. DOI: 10.1605/01.301-0006567006.2009. Pages 428-451.
• Quillen, Ian. "NYC Tech Programs Coming Under Microscope." Digital Directions. 04.03 (June 15, 2011): p12. Available at Academic OneFile, Computer Database, Expanded Academic ASAP, and General OneFile of Gale Cengage Learning - Gale Document Number: GALE|A259844852.
  • "Some of the New York City Department of Education's technology initiatives are being put under the microscope by local media outlets in the context of possible teacher layoffs and other fiscal pressures facing the 1.1 million-student district. "
• Hetherman, Stephen Crowe. An application of multi-faceted Rasch measurement to monitor effectiveness of the written composition in English in the New York City Department of Education (dissertation). Columbia University Teachers College, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, May 17, 2004. UMI Number 3135342.
• Howell, Fanon John (en:New School University). Accountable Choice: Governance, Evaluation, and Culture in the New York City Department of Education (dissertation). ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, August 2010 (ProQuest publishing date: 2011). UMI Number: 3458102.

Additional sources:

• James-Hucey, Joyce L. Power dynamics in the Universal Pre-Kindergarten collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and community-based organizations from 1997 to 2008 (dissertation). Teachers College, Columbia University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2012. UMI Number 3545638. (abstract available online, but document not available online - one would have to contact a Wikipedian who can access a physical copy in a library)

I can provide any of the documents above to any editor who wants them. As one source points out, there are 1.1 million students in this school district, more than there are people in the U.S. state of Wyoming. If someone wants to see sources from traditional newspapers I can show those too. WhisperToMe (msg) 16:32, 8 lug 2013 (CEST)

Well, I regret we can't have edweek as a source, because its access is restricted to subscribers (somehow, it's not freely verifiable).
It doesn't matter, indeed, if books can be read only by those who own a copy of them; this is how it usually goes with books and we presume good faith in those users who summarise their contents (but there's perhaps nothing worse in our wikiquette than cheating about sources). I understand the Department is quite new, after its renewal in 2002, but I do believe that it should, just the same, be important enough to have already been the object of some studies, I mean academic studies, which are just a step beyond journalism and campaigning websites (I saw that in en.wiki's article, most of the sources are newspapers, and most of the rest is "institutional" stuff). Nothing personally against those, but we already have serious troubles with our domestic political biases, we really don't need to borrow more from abroad :-) (I know you know that in saying this I don't want to be unrespectful by any mean :-)
So, concretely, Hetherman, Stephen Crowe captures my imagination, and the title lets me suspect that it might be the kind of source we prefer; actually I don't know what the book says about the Dept. but I also suspect you'll soon tell us :-) The same for the following one, Howell, Fanon John. I hope I was able to render some of our "habits", please consider that I sincerely appreciate your contribution, so thank you again for helping us :-) -- g · ℵ (msg) 00:27, 9 lug 2013 (CEST)

You are welcome. The English Wikipedia explicitly states that it does admit sources behind paywalls (en:Wikipedia:EL#Sites_requiring_registration) so I often use those sources and give as much information as possible when writing in English. It can be limiting to exclude paywall sources; there are users on the English Wikipedia who send personal copies of articles behind paywalls to help sourcing (en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange), and I heard Reddit Scholar can also fetch copies of paywall articles. For the Hetherman article on the Rasch measurements, I found its abstract. Howell's dissertation is mentioned in page 10 of this document. Since you want sources that are freely verifiable I can get those too. Do you want five of them? I do have access to the databases with the journal sources, so I can e-mail them to you anytime. For sourcing from domestic Italian sources, I am unaware of recent articles about this district, especially since there is far less immigration from Italy than there used to be. WhisperToMe (msg) 18:25, 9 lug 2013 (CEST)

Policies can be slightly different across the wikis, and this usually reflects differences among the relevant contexts in which the sister projects are respectively built. This doesn't mean we aren't working for the same Project, thus providing contents for a common scope :-) Honestly, I would avoid by now to enter into a comparison or a similar discussion. At the moment, more simply and more urgently, I believe we need sources for this article, in which we have to connect at least the main concepts to the authors that conceived them. Personally, I have a different approach to this article, also because it will mostly be a translation of the English one. We need to import (translated) text with related sources which can be suitable to our "habits", so - imho - it's not a matter of quantity of sources, rather I believe it regards their quality and reliability, in it.wiki's perspective. This doesn't mean at all that we need Italian sources, we only need that the main concepts are supported by reliable sources.
So, to be practical, let's start from what this article already says: it says that this Dept. is "the biggest" educational system of all the USA. Personally I have no doubt it is, you too told me that, so I'm sure it really is. Still, we need sources.
This system - the article is saying - is "the most influential" throughout the Nation: citation needed.
At the moment, all what we have are two forms, one of which is for feeding fees, the other is for racial identification: they both could serve as sources for very different concepts, i.e. "the Dept. charges different fees on feeding, depending on the family's income"[1] and "the system provides specialised teaching depending on social groups of provenance"[2].
Now, we can continue in a subpage, if you wish, because the discussion here must go on in Italian, as usual, and this is not a stop, only a transfer :-) -- g · ℵ (msg) 01:26, 10 lug 2013 (CEST)

Thank you :) - I'll put sourcing below. The purpose of the two forms is to cite for the names "Consiglio di amministrazione della pubblica istruzione della Città di New York" and "Provveditorato agli Studi della Città di New York" which were at one time used by the district. Today the district does not have forms in Italian at all. WhisperToMe (msg) 06:12, 10 lug 2013 (CEST)

E

Al di là della questione fonti, che sopra è oggetto di discussione in inglese con il nostro Collega d'oltremare, torniamo alla discussione sull'enciclopedicità: come detto sopra io quoto Paginazero, non vedo ragioni ostative alla permanenza della voce. Ma sarebbe opportuno sentire anche altri pareri :-) -- g · ℵ (msg) 01:28, 10 lug 2013 (CEST)

More sourcing

I'll provide the following:

• Baum, Geraldine. "N.Y. union seeks to block disclosure of teacher evaluations." Los Angeles Times. December 9, 2010. -- "The New York City teachers union argued Wednesday before the state Supreme Court that the nation's largest school district should not follow through with its plan to disclose evaluation information about some 12,000 teachers by name, saying it could do serious harm. The union filed a lawsuit this fall to stop the New York City Department of Education[...]"

WhisperToMe (msg) 06:12, 10 lug 2013 (CEST)

WhisperToMe (msg) 06:12, 10 lug 2013 (CEST)

Rimozione E

Dato che nessuno si è espresso in senso contrario, durante un tempo abbastanza lungo, rimuovo il tpl E. La voce resta con poco contenuto e mal fontato, nel senso che non sono tutte fonti adeguate, penso nei prossimi giorni di sceverare se non ci sono pareri contrari -- g · ℵ (msg) 01:43, 6 set 2013 (CEST)