7 ms·

NY releases grim stats on percentage of grads who are "college ready"

30 points by msabalau 16y ago

New York released statistics that show that only 41% of NY students graduate prepared to get at least a "C" in college level math and writting classes. Charter schools do much worse--only 10% of charter school students meet this "college ready" standard.

msabalau 16y ago
New York released statistics that show that only 41% of NY students graduate prepared to get at least a "C" in college level math and writting classes. Charter schools do much worse--only 10% of charter school students meet this "college ready" standard.
Alex3917 16y ago
For comparison, nationwide only 9% of 16- to 18-year-olds are able to read at a 'proficient' level, meaning they can read well enough to figure out a bus schedule or compare and contrast two different editorials. (And what they call proficient is really only an 8th-grade reading level.) http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
- klbarry 16y ago
  That is surprising and saddening.
jackowayed 16y ago
> the current graduation rate of 64 percent, a number often promoted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as evidence that his education policies are working. It is so sad when a 64% graduation rate is seen as proof that policies are working.
- jhamburger 16y ago
  True it is sad. But to be fair, almost everyone who isnt poor in new york either lives in the suburbs or sends their kids to private school...so NYC is basically one big inner city district.
forkandwait 16y ago
Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure?
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  >Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure? I took a HR/labor management course in college. The professor summed up labor negotiations like this: "You get the union you deserve." If management views the union as an adversary, the union becomes an adversary. If management takes every opportunity to break the union, the union takes every opportunity to further entrench itself. The best way to make a union a partner in improving education is to actually engage them in improving education. Instead we seem to mostly get political grandstanding and trolling.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I've noticed that to some extent among grad students, though that's a weird variety of union. But the most militant, adversarial grad-student unions tend to be paired with the most dysfunctional, adversarial administrations (not sure which came first). I was fortunate to be part of one that had a mostly symbiotic working relationship with our administration (we weren't even officially a "union", just a "student association"). As a result we negotiated using "soft power" rather than things like strikes; e.g. made sure the administration was aware that having happy grad students promoting the school was critical to their own success (in recruiting students, say, since we voluntarily ran the prospective-student visit weekend, and gave them candid information on what life at the university was like). One of the important aspects was that there were people we could negotiate with who: 1) at least sort of cared and were willing to talk to the student association; and 2) actually had the power to agree to things. The worst examples are where you have a fairly bureaucratic UAW-affiliate grad-student union negotiating with a faceless-bureaucracy administration, where neither side sees the other as part of the same team in any way, and it's not even clear who on either side has any authority to speak for anyone or make concessions.
- Anechoic 16y ago
  As has been pointed out before, if teachers unions are the problem, one would expect that states without collective bargaining requirements would outperform states with those requirements. They don't: http://shankerblog.org/?p=895 http://shankerblog.org/?p=895
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Lately education has become a bit of a cause celebre, but a few years ago, when the numbers were just as bad, whenever this problem was mentioned there were two immediate responses: 1) It's the parent's fault, and 2) Need more money to get better results. At some point, the American public started believing that the cost of something purchased with public funds was directly proportional to the value it gave. So it was like "New aircraft carrier? That thing costs 2 Billion dollars! Must be really valuable to national security" But the amount of money you pay for something and the good that it provides -- especially in systems that are immune to the retooling and re-engineering effects of recessions -- are completely independent of each other. Especially with the U.S. budget crisis coming, maybe this issue will open some eyes, but I doubt it.
- yardie 16y ago
  1) It's always been the teacher's fault, then other people's kids, other parents, but never our snowflake. 2) I don't know if the money spend has actually increased. My state, Florida, used to use lottery profits to complement state spending, then used it to supplement state spending cuts. Luckily, I graduated before the bubble popped (the surplus years) because so much of the state and county budget was based around building fees, property taxes, title transfers, etc.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - wmil 16y ago
    Between 1985 and 1997 Kansas City was ordered by a judge to vastly increase spending. There was no educational improvement. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html
    - yardie 16y ago
      With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability. Looks like they were spending money just to spend it. What did they demand from the students? parents? teachers? Were disruptive students (what I consider the biggest problem) isolated and punished for bad behavior? Were the parents required to review the child's work, meet the teachers, provide a proper meal? Were the teachers asked to give feedback, meet goals, try new techniques? The main thing the report wants to speak about is the Imperial federal judge (typical for a CATO report) while the real problem lied in the way the district was run. Shitty management doesn't get better with more money. Money just makes it worse.
WillyF 16y ago
The article says that 23% of students are "college ready" in NYC. That's probably way too low, but what is the goal? I hope it's not 100%. College isn't for everyone, and I think that it's misguided to make college preparation the primary goal of high school (isn't that what prep schools are for?).
- xxpor 16y ago
  Not everyone who should go to college can afford a prep school.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    ...or even college. Same issue.
    - xxpor 16y ago
      There is much more financial assistance available for college though.
- Umalu 16y ago
  The 23% figure cited in the article is students ready for college or careers: "only 23 percent of students in New York City graduated ready for college or careers in 2009." I read that to mean going to college or getting a job. This in means that 77% are not prepared for anything other than continuing to live at home.
uptown 16y ago
I'd like to know what percentage of college graduates are "real-world ready". Certainly some schools prepare their students better than others with skills and experience applicable to the types of careers they're likely to enter upon graduation, but I still feel that too-high a percentage of colleges in this country leave graduates with a mountain of debt and questionably-marketable real-world skills. It's a difficult challenge ... to educate the masses with employable skills in an subject that these people hopefully hold some amount of interest or passion for ... but the benefits to the individuals and the nation's work-force of achieving that goal are immeasurable.
jtbigwoo 16y ago
Let's pretend that an assistant manager at best buy had to deal with the same working conditions as we find in the schools: -First off, she would be required to get a college degree and a state certification in retail management. She wouldn't necessarily be paid any better, however. -A large minority of her customers would never actually buy anything, but mostly just nap in the store, harass and occasionally assault employees and customers, deface and damage the store. -Many of her customers would never have seen DVD players or computers and so most of her customer time is spent trying to explain basic concepts like what a television is. -Anything short of actual assault would not be enough to remove a customer from the store, though he/she might be required to sit in the store office for a few minutes. -She would be required to review hundreds of pages of paperwork each week on her own time. -She would be expected to maintain a profitable store that also improved the community and made her customers better people. Why do we tolerate conditions at our schools that we'd never tolerate in any other employer? (Other than prisons, I guess)
- hubb 16y ago
  If you want to complain about the behaviour of children, you should simply do so: masking it with a shallow comparison to a for-profit retail chain is more than a little silly. Any child is entitled to attend a public school for free, and that entitlement is protected by the government -- what can I get at best buy for free, and why would I ever be entitled to anything there?
  - zach 16y ago
    Aww, you're no fun. The point of the metaphor is how different and crazy the school environment is, after all. So let's just add your argument in! - The customers are given personal gift cards to purchase products, yet few are motivated in doing so, so they just let them expire. These cards are not valid at any other store, though, and similarly cannot be used for any other merchandise than the store offers, even if the store's products aren't very good. Good point!
JonnieCache 16y ago
If civilisation is to survive, education requires a total shift in thinking and perspective. Unfortunately I think it is too much for a lot of people to accept, as our notions of how education should be are too interwoven with our notions of our place in society. We need to stop thinking about academic education and vocational education as separate. We need to stop thinking, 'clever kids to the universities, the rest to apprenticeships if they're lucky.' This is a bad meme. We do not need to 'repair' the distinction between academia and the trades, we do not need to put them on an equal footing, we do not need to stop treating less-academic kids as less important than more academic ones. We need to recognise the distinction for what it is, a myth, a cognitive dissonance, and destroy it. We need everyone to have both aesthetic skills and dextrous skills. We need everyone to be comfortable with interpersonal skills as much as they are with technical, or manual skills. We need that dreaded[1] term, a holistic approach. Most of all we need to stop educating our children in factories using the logic, language and paradigms of industrial manufacturing. We need to educate our children to be happy and adaptive human beings. The employability part will follow from that, we don't need to worry about it directly. [1] Damn you hippies, for ruining our perfectly good words.
HilbertSpace 16y ago
None of this makes any sense: Nearly all the people in NY are in areas of high cost of living and, thus, are relatively well paid. That should also make them relatively competent and relatively good as parents with relatively accomplished children. In Manhattan, the cost of living, etc. are higher. In contrast, I went to a public high school in the South; nearly everyone graduated; and 97% of the graduates went to college. I did well in math and science, but English literature didn't make much sense to me, and somehow the way French was taught I just didn't 'get it' (my father and brother were both quite good at French but somehow didn't help me). My SAT total was over 1400; still, except for math and science, high school was not so easy for me; my high school was not really easy; in some of the courses, a lot of the students did better than I did. I did well enough in college, especially in math and science. I went to a relatively good college, and there the girls in the humanities classes were much better than I was; my only retaliation was to totally blow them away in math and science, which was easy to do. So, not doing so well in a public high school in the South, I was plenty successful in college. So, I don't 'get it': If my public high school in the South did so well, then why are NY and Manhattan having so many problems? Where are they missing it? At one point, here in NYS 70 miles north of Wall Street, my wife and I were considering having children and wondered about the quality of the schools, so she called a local high school and asked to visit. She was brilliant, Valedictorian, PBK, 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow Wilson, and research university Ph.D. In college once she wanted to take a history course, didn't need the credit, so wanted just to audit. The prof asked audits also to take the tests, so she did. It was a lecture hall course with 300 students. At the end the prof told her that she should have taken the course for credit since she got the highest grade in the class. Brilliant. So, with her credentials, she got a good reception for a visit. She sat in on a senior class in history and concluded that it would have been challenging for her. I'm not 'getting it': Where are these really bad schools in NY? Just what is it about college the students can't do? I've taught undergraduates at Indiana University, Georgetown University, and Ohio State; except for one 'special' collection of students at Georgetown, the students were from good enough down to not so bad. Just what is it about NYS students that are much less good? What is all the screaming about in NY? Just trying to get more money for the teachers? Maybe we need to see the some distributions of SAT and CEEB scores for some representative samples of students from Manhattan, the rest of NYS, and some other states.

30 points by msabalau 16y ago

msabalau 16y ago

Alex3917 16y ago

For comparison, nationwide only 9% of 16- to 18-year-olds are able to read at a 'proficient' level, meaning they can read well enough to figure out a bus schedule or compare and contrast two different editorials. (And what they call proficient is really only an 8th-grade reading level.) http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF

klbarry 16y ago
That is surprising and saddening.

jackowayed 16y ago

> the current graduation rate of 64 percent, a number often promoted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as evidence that his education policies are working. It is so sad when a 64% graduation rate is seen as proof that policies are working.

jhamburger 16y ago
True it is sad. But to be fair, almost everyone who isnt poor in new york either lives in the suburbs or sends their kids to private school...so NYC is basically one big inner city district.

forkandwait 16y ago

Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure?

jtbigwoo 16y ago
>Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure? I took a HR/labor management course in college. The professor summed up labor negotiations like this: "You get the union you deserve." If management views the union as an adversary, the union becomes an adversary. If management takes every opportunity to break the union, the union takes every opportunity to further entrench itself. The best way to make a union a partner in improving education is to actually engage them in improving education. Instead we seem to mostly get political grandstanding and trolling.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I've noticed that to some extent among grad students, though that's a weird variety of union. But the most militant, adversarial grad-student unions tend to be paired with the most dysfunctional, adversarial administrations (not sure which came first). I was fortunate to be part of one that had a mostly symbiotic working relationship with our administration (we weren't even officially a "union", just a "student association"). As a result we negotiated using "soft power" rather than things like strikes; e.g. made sure the administration was aware that having happy grad students promoting the school was critical to their own success (in recruiting students, say, since we voluntarily ran the prospective-student visit weekend, and gave them candid information on what life at the university was like). One of the important aspects was that there were people we could negotiate with who: 1) at least sort of cared and were willing to talk to the student association; and 2) actually had the power to agree to things. The worst examples are where you have a fairly bureaucratic UAW-affiliate grad-student union negotiating with a faceless-bureaucracy administration, where neither side sees the other as part of the same team in any way, and it's not even clear who on either side has any authority to speak for anyone or make concessions.
Anechoic 16y ago
As has been pointed out before, if teachers unions are the problem, one would expect that states without collective bargaining requirements would outperform states with those requirements. They don't: http://shankerblog.org/?p=895 http://shankerblog.org/?p=895

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Lately education has become a bit of a cause celebre, but a few years ago, when the numbers were just as bad, whenever this problem was mentioned there were two immediate responses: 1) It's the parent's fault, and 2) Need more money to get better results. At some point, the American public started believing that the cost of something purchased with public funds was directly proportional to the value it gave. So it was like "New aircraft carrier? That thing costs 2 Billion dollars! Must be really valuable to national security" But the amount of money you pay for something and the good that it provides -- especially in systems that are immune to the retooling and re-engineering effects of recessions -- are completely independent of each other. Especially with the U.S. budget crisis coming, maybe this issue will open some eyes, but I doubt it.

yardie 16y ago
1) It's always been the teacher's fault, then other people's kids, other parents, but never our snowflake. 2) I don't know if the money spend has actually increased. My state, Florida, used to use lottery profits to complement state spending, then used it to supplement state spending cuts. Luckily, I graduated before the bubble popped (the surplus years) because so much of the state and county budget was based around building fees, property taxes, title transfers, etc.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- wmil 16y ago
  Between 1985 and 1997 Kansas City was ordered by a judge to vastly increase spending. There was no educational improvement. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html
  - yardie 16y ago
    With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability. Looks like they were spending money just to spend it. What did they demand from the students? parents? teachers? Were disruptive students (what I consider the biggest problem) isolated and punished for bad behavior? Were the parents required to review the child's work, meet the teachers, provide a proper meal? Were the teachers asked to give feedback, meet goals, try new techniques? The main thing the report wants to speak about is the Imperial federal judge (typical for a CATO report) while the real problem lied in the way the district was run. Shitty management doesn't get better with more money. Money just makes it worse.

WillyF 16y ago

The article says that 23% of students are "college ready" in NYC. That's probably way too low, but what is the goal? I hope it's not 100%. College isn't for everyone, and I think that it's misguided to make college preparation the primary goal of high school (isn't that what prep schools are for?).

xxpor 16y ago
Not everyone who should go to college can afford a prep school.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  ...or even college. Same issue.
  - xxpor 16y ago
    There is much more financial assistance available for college though.
Umalu 16y ago
The 23% figure cited in the article is students ready for college or careers: "only 23 percent of students in New York City graduated ready for college or careers in 2009." I read that to mean going to college or getting a job. This in means that 77% are not prepared for anything other than continuing to live at home.

uptown 16y ago

I'd like to know what percentage of college graduates are "real-world ready". Certainly some schools prepare their students better than others with skills and experience applicable to the types of careers they're likely to enter upon graduation, but I still feel that too-high a percentage of colleges in this country leave graduates with a mountain of debt and questionably-marketable real-world skills. It's a difficult challenge ... to educate the masses with employable skills in an subject that these people hopefully hold some amount of interest or passion for ... but the benefits to the individuals and the nation's work-force of achieving that goal are immeasurable.

jtbigwoo 16y ago

Let's pretend that an assistant manager at best buy had to deal with the same working conditions as we find in the schools: -First off, she would be required to get a college degree and a state certification in retail management. She wouldn't necessarily be paid any better, however. -A large minority of her customers would never actually buy anything, but mostly just nap in the store, harass and occasionally assault employees and customers, deface and damage the store. -Many of her customers would never have seen DVD players or computers and so most of her customer time is spent trying to explain basic concepts like what a television is. -Anything short of actual assault would not be enough to remove a customer from the store, though he/she might be required to sit in the store office for a few minutes. -She would be required to review hundreds of pages of paperwork each week on her own time. -She would be expected to maintain a profitable store that also improved the community and made her customers better people. Why do we tolerate conditions at our schools that we'd never tolerate in any other employer? (Other than prisons, I guess)

hubb 16y ago
If you want to complain about the behaviour of children, you should simply do so: masking it with a shallow comparison to a for-profit retail chain is more than a little silly. Any child is entitled to attend a public school for free, and that entitlement is protected by the government -- what can I get at best buy for free, and why would I ever be entitled to anything there?
- zach 16y ago
  Aww, you're no fun. The point of the metaphor is how different and crazy the school environment is, after all. So let's just add your argument in! - The customers are given personal gift cards to purchase products, yet few are motivated in doing so, so they just let them expire. These cards are not valid at any other store, though, and similarly cannot be used for any other merchandise than the store offers, even if the store's products aren't very good. Good point!

JonnieCache 16y ago

If civilisation is to survive, education requires a total shift in thinking and perspective. Unfortunately I think it is too much for a lot of people to accept, as our notions of how education should be are too interwoven with our notions of our place in society. We need to stop thinking about academic education and vocational education as separate. We need to stop thinking, 'clever kids to the universities, the rest to apprenticeships if they're lucky.' This is a bad meme. We do not need to 'repair' the distinction between academia and the trades, we do not need to put them on an equal footing, we do not need to stop treating less-academic kids as less important than more academic ones. We need to recognise the distinction for what it is, a myth, a cognitive dissonance, and destroy it. We need everyone to have both aesthetic skills and dextrous skills. We need everyone to be comfortable with interpersonal skills as much as they are with technical, or manual skills. We need that dreaded[1] term, a holistic approach. Most of all we need to stop educating our children in factories using the logic, language and paradigms of industrial manufacturing. We need to educate our children to be happy and adaptive human beings. The employability part will follow from that, we don't need to worry about it directly. [1] Damn you hippies, for ruining our perfectly good words.

HilbertSpace 16y ago

None of this makes any sense: Nearly all the people in NY are in areas of high cost of living and, thus, are relatively well paid. That should also make them relatively competent and relatively good as parents with relatively accomplished children. In Manhattan, the cost of living, etc. are higher. In contrast, I went to a public high school in the South; nearly everyone graduated; and 97% of the graduates went to college. I did well in math and science, but English literature didn't make much sense to me, and somehow the way French was taught I just didn't 'get it' (my father and brother were both quite good at French but somehow didn't help me). My SAT total was over 1400; still, except for math and science, high school was not so easy for me; my high school was not really easy; in some of the courses, a lot of the students did better than I did. I did well enough in college, especially in math and science. I went to a relatively good college, and there the girls in the humanities classes were much better than I was; my only retaliation was to totally blow them away in math and science, which was easy to do. So, not doing so well in a public high school in the South, I was plenty successful in college. So, I don't 'get it': If my public high school in the South did so well, then why are NY and Manhattan having so many problems? Where are they missing it? At one point, here in NYS 70 miles north of Wall Street, my wife and I were considering having children and wondered about the quality of the schools, so she called a local high school and asked to visit. She was brilliant, Valedictorian, PBK, 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow Wilson, and research university Ph.D. In college once she wanted to take a history course, didn't need the credit, so wanted just to audit. The prof asked audits also to take the tests, so she did. It was a lecture hall course with 300 students. At the end the prof told her that she should have taken the course for credit since she got the highest grade in the class. Brilliant. So, with her credentials, she got a good reception for a visit. She sat in on a senior class in history and concluded that it would have been challenging for her. I'm not 'getting it': Where are these really bad schools in NY? Just what is it about college the students can't do? I've taught undergraduates at Indiana University, Georgetown University, and Ohio State; except for one 'special' collection of students at Georgetown, the students were from good enough down to not so bad. Just what is it about NYS students that are much less good? What is all the screaming about in NY? Just trying to get more money for the teachers? Maybe we need to see the some distributions of SAT and CEEB scores for some representative samples of students from Manhattan, the rest of NYS, and some other states.