Attendance rose slightly on the second day of the bus strike, but it was still just about 62 percent at schools for students with severe disabilities who rely most heavily on yellow buses.

With one in five students missing at least 20 days of school per year, the city is continuing it’s wake-up call program. The recorded messages, from celebrities and now fellow students, encourage students to get out of bed and get to school.

According to Department of Education officials, attendance on Wednesday was at 79.4 percent, a mere .2 percentage points lower than the rate for the last day of school in 2011 — despite the fact that many schools had canceled classes on Monday and Tuesday because the city had clocked none of its allotted snow days this year.

Forest Hills High School has more than 3,800 students, 12 assistant principals and 195 teachers. Despite its size and crowding issues, it has earned an A on its progress report three years in a row. The principal, Saul Gootnick, said his team changed the culture of the school by focusing on the classroom and introducing changes one step at a time. “You have to have a plan and you have to make people believe in what you think,” he said.

A parent writes about taking his 14-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son out of school for six days this month for a family trip to Israel — a journey that provided them with a serious bout of experiential learning. Did he make the right decision?

A third of New York City elementary and middle school students who failed state exams last spring did not move on to the next grade this school year, a decrease from the year before, when nearly half were held back.

In reviewing the results of the first year of its anti-truancy campaign, the city has found that chronically absent students who had attendance mentors fared better than those who did not. So the city is more than doubling the number of public school students who are assigned mentors this year.

Do you want to know how attendance relates to student test performance? How many students in the New York City schools were born in Guyana compared to those born in India? Or maybe you want to know how much the system spent on pensions. It’s all here, in the Independent Budget Office’s annual report.