How to Find a School’s Official Accountability Designation in New York State

In New York State, a school’s official accountability designation is the status the New York State Education Department (NYSED) assigns under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It is one of a small set of labels — most commonly Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI), Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI), or Local Support and Improvement (LSI) — and it is published on the state’s School Report Card, not on a school’s own website or recruitment materials.

That distinction matters for families. A school may describe itself as high-performing or on the rise, but the accountability designation is a defined, comparable classification that follows rules set in federal law and in New York’s approved ESSA plan. Finding it takes a few minutes once you know where to look.

What an accountability designation is — and what it is not

Under ESSA, every state must operate an accountability system, identify schools that need support, and publish an annual report card for every public school. State systems differ in their details, but they share a common architecture: several indicators are combined into domains, and the domains produce an overall classification or rating. Texas, for example, organizes its ratings around three domains — Student Achievement, School Progress, and Closing the Gaps — and publishes an overall campus or district rating label [1]. New York uses its own structure and its own labels, so a Texas rating and a New York designation are not comparable.

In New York, the designation functions as a support category rather than a letter grade. It answers a narrow question: based on a defined set of indicators, does this school require additional state or federal support, and if so, of what kind? The indicators New York uses include English language arts and mathematics achievement, student growth, chronic absenteeism, progress toward English language proficiency, high school graduation rates, and college, career, and civic readiness. The exact indicator set, cut scores, and identification schedule are set by NYSED and should be confirmed against the department’s current accountability materials for the year you are checking.

The designations New York uses

New York’s ESSA accountability system sorts schools into the categories below. The federal framework sets the floor for each category; NYSED sets the specific thresholds.

• Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI). The most intensive category. Federal law requires states to identify for CSI at least the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools that receive Title I funds, plus any high school that fails to graduate at least two-thirds of its students — that is, a four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate of 67 percent or lower. CSI identification generally occurs at least once every three years.
• Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI). Assigned to schools with one or more consistently underperforming student subgroups — for example, a subgroup whose performance stays below a state-set threshold across a defined number of years.
• Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI). Assigned when a school’s subgroup performance is low enough to match the level of the lowest-performing CSI schools.
• Local Support and Improvement (LSI). The category for schools that are not identified for federal support. LSI is the most common status and is sometimes described simply as not identified.
• Recognition. New York’s system also includes a recognition component for schools that demonstrate high performance or substantial improvement. Recognition is a separate distinction and does not replace a school’s support category.

Two terms are worth knowing before you read a designation. A Title I school is a school that receives federal funding based on the concentration of students from low-income families; the federal CSI requirement applies to Title I schools. A subgroup is a defined group of students — for example, students with disabilities, English language learners, or a racial or ethnic group — whose results are tracked separately.

Where the designation is published

There are four reliable places to look, in order of authority.

1. The NYSED School Report Card. NYSED publishes a report card for every public school and district in the state, including charter schools. The report card includes an accountability section that lists the school’s current status. Report cards are searchable by school name, district, or BEDS code — the Basic Educational Data System code New York uses to identify schools and districts. Keep BEDS codes separate from NCES IDs, the federal identifiers used in national datasets; a school has both, and they are not interchangeable. When you copy a code, preserve any leading zeros.
2. NYSED’s ESSA accountability designation lists. The department publishes statewide lists of schools identified for CSI, TSI, and ATSI, along with the methodology used to identify them. These lists are the authoritative record of who was identified in a given cycle.
3. Your district’s notice to parents. ESSA requires districts to notify parents whose children attend an identified school and to explain the reason for identification and the actions being taken. If your child attends a CSI or TSI school, you should receive a written notice.
4. For charter schools, the authorizer. New York charter schools are authorized by the Board of Regents, the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, or, in New York City, the city’s schools chancellor. Charter schools appear in the state accountability system like other public schools, and authorizers publish their own performance reports. An authorizer’s report is useful context but is not a substitute for the state designation.

Step by step: looking up a school

1. Write down the school’s full name and, if you have it, its district and BEDS code. School names repeat across the state; the code does not.
2. Open the NYSED School Report Card search and enter the school name or code. Confirm you have the right building — New York has many schools with similar names.
3. Open the most recent report card and find the accountability section. It should list the school’s status and, where applicable, the subgroups that triggered identification.
4. Note the reporting year on the report card, not the date you looked it up. A designation published in one school year rests on data from prior years, and identification cycles run on multi-year schedules.
5. Cross-check against the statewide designation list for the same cycle. If the two disagree, the statewide list is the controlling record.
6. If the school is in New York City, also check the city’s own school performance reports — and read them as a separate local measure rather than as the state designation.

New York City and other local reporting systems

New York City operates its own school performance reporting, including school quality reports and a performance dashboard that rate schools on local measures such as student progress, student achievement, school environment, and, for high schools, college and career readiness. These ratings are produced by the city, not by NYSED, and they use categories that differ from the state’s ESSA designations. A school can meet a local target and still be identified as TSI by the state, or the reverse.

Other large districts publish their own data dashboards as well. None of them replaces the state designation. When a school’s materials cite a rating, check which system produced it and for which year.

Older labels you may still see

Families sometimes encounter older designations in district documents, improvement plans, or news archives. Before ESSA, New York used a different vocabulary under the No Child Left Behind Act — labels such as School in Improvement, Corrective Action, Restructuring, and School Requiring Academic Progress, along with state intervention categories such as Priority School, Focus School, and Local Assistance Plan. Those terms describe a system that is no longer in use. If a document uses them, check its date; the current designation will be one of the ESSA categories described above.

What the designation can and cannot tell you

What it can tell you: whether the state has identified the school for support, which category applies, and — for TSI and ATSI — which student subgroups triggered the identification. That is specific, checkable information.

What it cannot tell you:

• It is not a general quality ranking. The designation reflects a defined set of indicators and thresholds, not everything a school does.
• It is not comparable across states. New York’s categories and Texas’s rating labels measure different things under different rules.
• Small-group results are often suppressed or carry wide uncertainty. A designation driven by one subgroup may say as much about that group’s size and prior performance as about the school overall.
• Year-to-year comparisons can mislead. Indicator definitions, cut scores, and identification cycles change, and some reporting years during the COVID-19 pandemic did not produce a full set of designations.
• Identification is not the same as a mandate to close or restructure a school, and leaving a category does not by itself prove that instruction improved.

Questions to ask the school or district

• What is our school’s current accountability designation, and for which reporting year?
• If the school is identified, which indicators and which student subgroups drove the identification?
• What is in the school’s improvement plan, and how is progress measured?
• How much of the identification rests on data that is now several years old?
• What support — funding, staffing, coaching — comes with the designation, and who provides it?
• If the school is not identified, when is the next identification cycle?
• Can you point me to the state report card and the statewide designation list for our school?

Sources and methodology

This article describes the general structure of state accountability systems and the ESSA-required categories that New York uses. The two sources retrieved for this assignment are Texas Education Agency pages documenting Texas’s accountability framework — its domains, rating labels, and 2026 rating system manual. They are cited here only as verified examples of how a state publishes an accountability framework; they do not describe New York’s designations, cut scores, or current-year lists.

No current NYSED source was supplied with this assignment. New York–specific details — the exact indicator set, cut scores, identification years, and the current list of identified schools — should be confirmed directly against NYSED’s accountability pages and School Report Cards before publication or use in a decision. Source-check date not recorded for New York–specific content; editorial verification required. The Texas sources were retrieved October 12, 2026.