Dear Commons Community,
It was reported on Monday that the latest data released by the NYC Department of Education indicate that only 29% of public high school students in the city are prepared for college-level work. That’s barely an improvement from last year, when 28% of students qualified, the Department of Education announced as part of its A-to-F report cards for schools. To be college-ready, students must qualify for CUNY freshmen classes by doing well on the SAT, the math and English Regents, the ACT or the CUNY assessment test. In a critical editorial, the Daily News commented:
“The school report card grades released Monday prove just how catastrophically New York’s public schools have been failing their students. The city’s entire education establishment — teachers and principals alike — has fallen inexcusably down on the job.
Only 29% of high school seniors who graduate in four years come out of the school system prepared for college-level work. That’s less than one-third of the 80,000 or so graduates a year who rely on the public schools for their educations. Beyond shameful, the results border on criminal.
Only in the last few years have top education officials come clean on the damning fact that the schools have been lying to students. They always said a Regents diploma certified that a young person was well educated . It wasn’t true.
The vast majority of graduates who went on to higher education discovered that they were completely ill-prepared. By the tens of thousands, they required remedial schooling in English, math and other subjects to do college work.
Under Mayor Bloomberg, the high school graduation rate climbed from 46% in 2005 to 65% in 2011. The number of teenagers scoring Regents diplomas rose by 5,000 from 2011 to 2012 alone.
All that is to the good and required enormous hard work. But let’s not kid ourselves. More than 70% of the graduates still fall below college readiness — and to attain that level does not require superhigh achievement.”
This bottom line is that the NYC public schools under the current administration simply passed students through the system without providing them the education.
Tony
