Link: 80% of N.Y.C. Public School graduates below grade level in Core subjects

[Lanny]

http://www.foxbusine...ead-grade-level

 

Texas is on the correct path, but, hopefully, the testing will be changed, in the near future. DD is a Distance Learning student, in TTUISD, which, legally, is a Texas Public School. So, DD is subject to the testing required in Texas Public Schools.

 

The story about N.Y.C. graduates is, IMHO, a tragedy. Hopefully, New York State will require testing, like Texas does, and improve their Public Schools.

[*Lulu*]

I will copy what I posted on a thread with a link to another article about this, (the original I believe)

 

 

Posted Today, 11:26 AM

So they are saying 80% of those seeking entrance to the community college need remediation, but did not give figures for the graduates headed to four year univerities? (Just checking to make sure MY reading comprehension isn't slipping. )

 

While that number is appalling, outside of the context of what percentage of HS graduates go on to CC and without the comparison of the percentage of graduates who need remediation at four year institutions, it does not provide a clear picture of the situation.

 

[redsquirrel]

It is a little bit more complicated than that:

 

http://www.nypost.co...khr6Mqecc2fQ7oO

 

Department of Education officials said the overall remediation rates for city high-school grads at all CUNY colleges — including the four-year schools — actually dropped to 55.8 percent in 2012.

They said the main reason the rates had been climbing at the community colleges was because CUNY raised its standards for math in both 2011 and 2012.

They also noted that roughly 10,000 more students graduated from high school and attended a CUNY college in 2011 compared with 2002, when overall remediation rates were nearly the same.

“When you increase the number participating and you hold essentially steady on remediation, that means you’re increasing the number who are passing the bar,†said Josh Thomases, deputy academic chief at the DOE. “That said, I don’t want anyone to go to remediation.â€

 

 

 

And FYI, NY is a Regents state. Students are tested in math and reading every year in grades 3 through 8. They are tested in math and reading and science in third and 8th grade. They are tested in math and reading and science and history in 8th grade. Then comes high school testing. There are 5 Regents exams that all NY state students must pass: Integrated Math (AKA Algebra 1), one science Regents, US history, World History and Language Arts. My homeschooled student has the right to sit for those tests, and must if he wants to get into a NY state university without a NY high school diploma.

 

There are lots of other Regents exams that most college prep kids take: Geometry, Integrated Math II (Aka Algebra 2), Some upper level math that I can't remember the title, The science Regents are Earth Science, Biology, Chem, Physics. There is at least one English Arts Regents and might be more than one in high school. There are foreign language Regents in French and Spanish and German.

 

I should add that these are all in addition to any AP tests students take.

 

So, when you say that you hope NY becomes a testing state, I can assure you the students are testing within an inch of their lives. This is nothing new. The first Regent exam was administered in 1866.

[Lanny]

It is a little bit more complicated than that:

 

<snip>

So, when you say that you hope NY becomes a testing state, I can assure you the students are testing within an inch of their lives. This is nothing new. The first Regent exam was administered in 1866.

 

Certainly sounds like the right process, from your description, but if the idea is that if one receives a High School diploma from a N.Y.C. Public High School and has passed those examinations, one understands the material.....

 

If High School graduates, who have passed those examinations, require remedial courses, IMHO, something is wrong.

[MistyMountain]

I saw this article and I figured there was a little more to the story and they chose community colleges for a reason. I think that there are way to many students being left behind and graduating functionally illiterate though and way to many who never even graduate. The science scores in my state are abysmal.

 

The scariest thing about this article is the comments. Instead of having an intelligent conversation on the topic it is all blaming it on the simplest things and there is out right racism.

[SarahW]

Certainly sounds like the right process, from your description, but if the idea is that if one receives a High School diploma from a N.Y.C. Public High School and has passed those examinations, one understands the material.....

 

If High School graduates, who have passed those examinations, require remedial courses, IMHO, something is wrong.

 

The people who do well in High School tend to go to 4-year colleges. The kids who graduate by scraping by with C's, take a year off or more to work, and then go to CC to get a technical/associates degree, yeah, they might need to take a 099 class or two. I don't really know if that's the school's fault. Sounds more like the fault of the student to me. I would think Fox Business news would agree with me on that one...

[Lanny]

From the article I linked to, this is what I consider to be especially sad, if it is true:

 

"nearly 80% of New York City high school graduates have trouble with basic skills like reading, writing and math. The vast majority do not have the basic skills you would expect of someone half their age."

[redsquirrel]

They don't have to pass the tests in grades 3-8. Those are evaluative tests. They test the teacher and the performance of the kids. As a parent it is a tool to evaluate the teacher and the school. The exams in high school can keep you from graduating. In theory, you can pass the class and fail the Regents. You can fail the class but pass the Regents, but would still not pass the class. However all students must pass those 5 'core' Regents to get a diploma. Passing is a grade of 65%. That doesn't mean mastery or even college level of prep if you barely pass the Regents. It means you met the minimum requirements. It's not that hard to get a 65 or a 66%. I am impressed when people get 95% or more.

 

That is why those of us on the college track worked so darn hard to get very high scores on our Regent exams. Just taking those 5 core tests don't get you a Regent diploma. A Regent diploma is in addition to a local high school diploma. To get a Regent diploma you have to pass a bunch more of the exams... I can't remember exactly how many. As a teen I was in the college track and we just took them all. I have what would now be considered a Regents diploma with honors. I think the honors came from taking (and passing) 4 science and a language exam. You can't take the exam without taking the class.

 

It wouldn't surprise me at all if lots of teens, applying to a community college had barely passing grades in their core regents. I would expect people applying only to a community college (or CUNY) to not have been college prep. I think in NY if you are an achieving student, the education available at most public high schools is pretty darn good. It is the kids who aren't college bound that I think easily fall through the cracks.

[Dmmetler]

Having been a TTU grad student, I can tell you there were a lot of TX PS grads who had to take 099 classes there, too-especially in non-technical majors. Sadly, some of the worst were in education. One of my TA-ships was monitoring a computer-taught prep class for the education program entrance exam, and a lot of the kids failed that test repeatedly. It didn't go beyond High school level math, but they couldn't pass it.

[redsquirrel]

NM. I am so bad at computer stuff, lol

This article is so horribly written that it can't even manage to summarize correctly the data that it cites inline. The article claims that 80% of NYC high school graduates can't read at grade level. What it says later is that 80% of NYC public high school graduates enrolled in NYC community colleges need some kind of remediation. Obviously, that's not good, but they are two almost completely unconnected numbers. And what's the nature of this remediation? A one week class? One semester? Two years? That's a big part of the story.

 

Then, the article paraphrases Michelle Rhee, almost certainly incorrectly, saying that both rich and poor kids in the US alike rank 26th out of 30th in industrialized nations in some unspecified math test. This just doesn't pass the sniff test. And there's not reference cited.

 

Now, homeschoolers aren't the strongest defenders of public schools, but we don't need to stretch the truth to make our points.

[butterflymommy]

My homeschooled student has the right to sit for those tests, and must if he wants to get into a NY state university without a NY high school diploma.

 

I believe there are alternatives to this now-- GED, and taking a number of credits as an enrolled student that "counts" as the HS diploma, and maybe one other option. The whole thing confuses me.

 

RE the racism comment, I haven't read the comments in the article, but there are indeed stark differences in student achievement in NYC when broken down by race. In fact if you considered only white and asian test scores our schools would look superb.

 

There is probably a significant language factor at play with hispanic test scores and aptitude as so many of the students are not fluent in english (of course, the same could be said of asian immigrants...).

 

Anyway as has been pointed out, this statistic is for graduates attending NYC CCs, not for the student body at large, so it may be misleading. And it's not new news, this statistic, or one similar to it, has been out for at least a year.

[Lanny]

Having been a TTU grad student, I can tell you there were a lot of TX PS grads who had to take 099 classes there, too-especially in non-technical majors. Sadly, some of the worst were in education. One of my TA-ships was monitoring a computer-taught prep class for the education program entrance exam, and a lot of the kids failed that test repeatedly. It didn't go beyond High school level math, but they couldn't pass it.

 

Hopefully, with the examinations Texas requires for High School core courses now, the number of students needing those remedial courses will decrease. This is OT, but it certainly applies to STEM majors. I suspect some of them see the photo of the TTU swimming pool and think "party school", but if they think that, they are out, very quickly.

"University PreEngineering

 

Students who do not meet the Whitacre College of Engineering admission requirements are admitted initially to the Texas Tech University PreEngineering Program and may apply for admission to the Whitacre College foundational curriculum upon satisfaction of the college internal transfer admission standards."

[redsquirrel]

I believe there are alternatives to this now-- GED, and taking a number of credits as an enrolled student that "counts" as the HS diploma, and maybe one other option. The whole thing confuses me

 

It is confusing. There might be one more alternative that I don't know about, but the sitting the 5 regent exams is the alternative for the GED. If a student presents as a GED student, there is a fear that they are not taken seriously as a student. NY parents didn't want their homeschooled kids to end up in the GED ghetto and asked for an alternative. Sitting and performing well on the Regent exams it is a way of proving they can compete with the rest of NY students.

[redsquirrel]

I was thinking about this and there is one more interesting point, at least I find it interesting. This is only about NYC schools. I know people who have never been to this part of the country might not realize it, but NY is a very big state. As an almost lifelong New Yorker, it isn't unheard of to meet people in this state who have never been to NYC in their lives. Think about it, is Huston all of Texas? Is Chicago all of Illinois? Is LA all of California?

 

And, again as an almost life long New Yorker, I know lots and lots and lots of people who grew up in NYC or have lived there for part of their lives. Even I did my couple of years there. And I cannot think of a single person I met who attended a regular public school in NYC. They all attended private, charter, or specialized schools. But, once you get out of the city private schools become comparatively rare. Outside the city either the community is too poor/rural to have private schools or the area is so well off that the public schools are great. In some of the larger cities, such as Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany and Rochester there are some private schools, but excellent public schools can be found if you can afford the neighborhood.

 

I meet many people in my small college city who moved here so they didn't have to pay for private school. My own sister is one of them. My sis and her husband left ASAP once they had kids. They just didn't want to run that NYC private school rat race. I know a few families who are split between NYC and Upstate. There are three families in my social circle alone. The family lives here and one parent commutes to a job in NYC. Either the one parent lives in NYC and comes here on the weekends or the job is the type that the commuting is less frequent. They can mostly work from home and only visit NYC once or twice a month and still make enough to support a family. Why to they do that? Because the schools are better here and it is a great place to raise a family.

 

That means that in the City, students who are attending the regular public schools have no where else to go. Their families are simply too poor to afford a different type of school, and the process for charter is VERY difficult and intimidating. So, while the 80% number (whatever it means because that article is just not very good) is impressive, it is really not referring to 80% of all school children in NYC. Sadly, It is referring to 80% of the poorest kids..who then maybe also applied to community college? I can't really tell. But, anything that is said about public schools in NY do not refer to a cross section of the population. And anyone who writes about the NYC school system should know that.

[briansmama]

I read articles like this and then have to wonder- how can it be so difficult to get accepted into a good college these days if so many high school grads are so poorly educated???

[redsquirrel]

I read articles like this and then have to wonder- how can it be so difficult to get accepted into a good college these days if so many high school grads are so poorly educated???

 

Well, if you read the article and could actually figure out to what it was referring, you would notice that those students were applying to community colleges, not 4 year colleges or universities. It's not like they were taking AP classes and getting 5s, right? These are not teens who are getting stellar SAT scores.

[briansmama]

"This isn't just an inner city, poor schools issue. When Former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee appeared on our program, she told us that the underperformance can be seen in students of all backgrounds."

 

This is what I read that made me question why colleges are so competitive. I don't think there is anything wrong with attending community college. When a student transfers, their degree is awarded by the institution they graduate from, and students who first attend community colleges can still apply to competitive universities, which are increasingly difficult to get into.

 

My point is that if articles like this are correct, and high school grads are seriously lacking in core skills, how are any of them attending college? And they are, if you look at college admissions.

I read articles like this and then have to wonder- how can it be so difficult to get accepted into a good college these days if so many high school grads are so poorly educated???

 

One reason is the common online college application. Kids now are applying to substantially more schools than they were before, so naturally, acceptance rates are going to go down. It isn't unheard of here for kids to apply to 10 to 20 colleges.

[redsquirrel]

and NY can't be doing all that poorly:

 

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/10/16sos.h32.html?tkn=RLRF%2B4mUV1fjxGZAPk7Od%2FfW1p2K2SFHTAx9&cmp=clp-edweek&intc=EW-QC13-EWH

Hopefully, with the examinations Texas requires for High School core courses now, the number of students needing those remedial courses will decrease.

 

I fundamentally disagree with this assertion. Studies have shown that in Texas, the amount of remediation needed in public colleges went UP after they started their required-for-graduation testing. Life is not a multiple choice test. A valid high school graduation question for Social Studies is something like: Discuss for 30 minutes who should be the next President of the United States. But tests like that are too expensive to grade, so they will never happen.

[redsquirrel]

Well, it isn't impossible. The NY Regent are both multiple choice and essay. The Global History and Geography test is 50 multiple choice questions, One thematic essay and a second essay that is based on reading historical documents. The US History and Gov't exam is the same format. Both of those exams are mandatory for all students.

 

And they are expensive. For example, NY had a second language proficiency exam that all 8th graders had to take and pass. They could chose between French, Spanish, Latin, German or Italian. Not all schools could afford to offer all of those languages. In 2009 they stopped giving those tests due to cost. However, NY still has the requirement that all students have a foreign language in middle school, just not the statewide exam. The fact that they still have the requirement tells me that the state hopes to bring the exam back when the economy improves.

[VeritasMama]

This article is so horribly written that it can't even manage to summarize correctly the data that it cites inline. The article claims that 80% of NYC high school graduates can't read at grade level. What it says later is that 80% of NYC public high school graduates enrolled in NYC community colleges need some kind of remediation. Obviously, that's not good, but they are two almost completely unconnected numbers. And what's the nature of this remediation? A one week class? One semester? Two years? That's a big part of the story.

 

Then, the article paraphrases Michelle Rhee, almost certainly incorrectly, saying that both rich and poor kids in the US alike rank 26th out of 30th in industrialized nations in some unspecified math test. This just doesn't pass the sniff test. And there's not reference cited.

 

Now, homeschoolers aren't the strongest defenders of public schools, but we don't need to stretch the truth to make our points.

 

Michelle Rhee is citing the PISA test (Program for Internation Student Assessment) organized by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) of which the US is a member. It is an international test done every 3 years, with smaller scale testing done on a voluntary basis on at more regular intervals. In 2009, the US came in 32nd, that ranking includes non-industrialized and industrialized nations. In a 2005 test, the US came in 24th.

 

Here is an explanation from Wikipedia about the test results:

 

 

"Two studies have compared high achievers in mathematics on the PISA and the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Comparisons were made between those scoring at the "advanced" and "proficient" levels in mathematics on the NAEP with the corresponding performance on the PISA. Overall, 30 nations had higher percentages than the U.S. of students at the "advanced" level of mathematics. The only OECD countries with worse results were Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico. Six percent of U.S. students were "advanced" in mathematics compared to 28 percent in Taiwan. The highest ranked state in the U.S. (Massachusetts) was just 15th in the world if it was compared with the nations participating in the PISA. 31 nations had higher percentages of "proficient" students than the U.S. Massachusetts was again the best U.S. state, but it ranked just ninth in the world if compared with the nations participating in the PISA.^[32][33]

 

Comparisons with results for the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) appear to give different results—suggesting that the U.S. states actually do better in world rankings.^[34] The difference in apparent rankings is, however, almost entirely accounted for by the sampling of countries. PISA includes all of the OECD countries, while TIMSS is much more weighted in its sampling toward developing countries."

 

 

As an a former teacher, I have a lot of respect for Michelle Rhee. She is talking about the problems in education that everyone else is quick to explain away or ignore. She talks about it because she actually wants to fix it. I don't think it is fair to imply someone such as Rhee is inaccurate based on a hunch, you should have some knowledge of the subject before you discredit someone.

 

My father taught remedial English to high school graduates trying to get into college. They had high school diplomas, but couldn't read at a 12th grade level. If you can't read at a 12th grade level, you won't be able to do college level work. It really is that simple.

 

ETA: I thought I would clarify, the "OECD countries" are the countries that are members of the organisation and are tested every 3 years. Other countries also participate, in the testing, though the non-member states are often under developed and so their data is not always used in comparison with member states.

Michelle Rhee is citing the PISA test (Program for Internation Student Assessment) organized by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) of which the US is a member. It is an international test done every 3 years, with smaller scale testing done on a voluntary basis on at more regular intervals. In 2009, the US came in 32nd, that ranking includes non-industrialized and industrialized nations. In a 2005 test, the US came in 24th.

 

Oh, I agree with all of this. Where I think Rhee was misquoted (or misunderstood) in the quoted article is the idea that if you took the very wealthy kids at elite private schools, their results on this tests would be the same as very poor kids who are struggling just to survive. I'm not saying that rich kids are inherently smarter than poor kids, I'm just saying that if you are always worried about getting shot at school, you probably aren't focused much on learning. The quote I'm disagreeing with:

 

The poorest kids in America rank 26th out of the 30 developed nations in math compared to their peers. That's a trend we are too accustomed to seeing, but the trend is broader. The richest kids also rank 26th.

 

That just can't be right. And indeed, your quote contradicts this, assuming that Massachusetts is a richer-than-average state. Now, I'm sure if you average all the kids together, you get 26th, but that's not what the original author said.

 

As I said before -- there's all kinds of problems with public schools, but we don't need to exaggerate or lie to make our points.

[MistyMountain]

I think poor kids are compared to other poor kids and rich kids are compared to other rich kids not poor kids compared to everyone and rich kids compared to everyone. They are trying to show that it isn't just poor kids that are dragging us down. I went to a talk on school choice. My state is the lowest on the list of states with results and when they were talking about rich and poor kids results they were compared to other rich or poor kids. It is sad when you are in the worst testing states in one of the poorest testing industrialized nations. If New York's scores are so dismal I can imagine how bad our state's results are. We do have a good homeschooling network and can get money for that from the state and there are a few really good performing charters at least.

[shawthorne44]

Even the revised number that includes 4-year university kids is appalling.  What it says is the 55% of the kids that did well enough in school to go to some sort of college needed remedial classes.  

I am feeling grumpy and I think that the school district the graduated these kids need to fully fund the remedial classes.  That is probably just my grumpiness talking, but at the moment it makes sense.  

[Hunter]

NYC public schools are a weird thing. Unlike some other cities, there just aren't the fuzzy boundary areas, where the poor move to. Most of the entire island is VERY expensive housing. So the "poor" and PS just are not what others are thinking of, in comparison to their "poor" and PS. Many of these children don't speak English as their first language, and are cramped into tiny apartments.

 

As a state, NY has been tested to death and doesn't need more testing. And they have tried and discarded so many of the "new" ideas, before they were even "new" to the rest of the country.

 

NY and NYC just need to be left alone. They are doing EVERYTHING they know to do. God bless them.