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Only 37% Of NYC High School Grads Are Ready For College
By
Garth Johnston
Published Oct 25, 2011
Modified Oct 25, 2011
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Armadillo Stock / shutterstock
By
Garth Johnston
Published Oct 25, 2011
Modified Oct 25, 2011
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The new "report cards" for New York City's public high schools are out (you can read them here) and they do not paint the prettiest of pictures for our city's students, especially considering the fact that education has been one of the biggest touchstones for the Bloomberg regime. According to the data only one in four students who enter high school in the city are ready for college after four years and less than half of those that are ready bother to enroll. Shame Mayor Bloomberg can't blame this on Cathie Black, eh?
The new readiness data, which roughly is based on how NYC students perform at CUNY schools, was included for the first time in the report cards, though it won't start affecting school's grades next year. Bloomberg, who has emphasized graduation rates a lot (rather than actually being prepared for the next step in education), tried to play the bum news down yesterday saying, "Do every one of our 1.1 million kids that go to New York City public schools get a great education? No, but that is our objective, and we're going to keep working until we get there."
The data, and there is a lot of it, already has pulled up some interesting examples though. Like the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn "where 85 percent of kids graduated but just 1.3 percent were deemed college-ready." Still the new numbers, like most educational data, can still be taken with a few pounds of salt as even though a student may not be "ready for college" by CUNY standards, it doesn't mean they won't be going to college. For instance at the It Takes A Village Academy, "Principal Marina Vinitskaya said her school’s college-ready rate of less than 10 percent wasn’t an accurate marker because 91 percent of her students graduated in four years—and all of them were admitted to college."
As for other things learned in the report cards? 32.7 percent of schools received an A on their progress reports, 31.6 percent got B’s, 24 percent C’s, 8.2 percent D’s and 3.6 percent F’s. For reference, "last year, the number of schools scoring D’s and F#8217;s was about the same, while 38 percent of the schools received A’s, 29.7 percent earned B’s and 21.6 percent had C’s."
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