If You Thought 12th Grade Was Tough, Wait Till 16th New York Times
Here is a multiple choice question: Of the students who began an associate’s degree program at the City University of New York in 2006, what percentage graduated within three years?
a) 10 percent
b) 15 percent
c) 35 percent
The answer? a) 10 percent. Give students an additional year, and still only 15 percent of those who started at CUNY earned an associate’s degree, according to newly released city data. For a bachelor’s degree, the news was better, but not good. Forty-seven percent of students who started CUNY in 2003, fewer than half, graduated after six years.
Now an effort is under way to alert city educators at the elementary and secondary levels that the low college completion rates are no longer someone else’s problem. This year, for the first time, the city sent detailed reports to all of its high schools, telling them how many of their students who arrived at the city’s public colleges needed remedial courses and stayed enrolled. This summer also brought tougher standards on state reading and math tests, which caused proficiency rates to tumble, as part of an effort to call “proficient” only those students on track for a college-ready Regents diploma.
Speaking on Monday at the Education Nation event sponsored by NBC, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced two more efforts to strengthen ties between grade school and college. School, his announcement indicated, will no longer end at grade 12. Look out for grade 14 and even grade 16.
In one effort, IBM will work with the Department of Education and CUNY to develop a new high school that will run from grade 9 until the equivalent of grade 14. It is meant as a preprofessional program for students interested in computer science. The idea is that at the end of grade 14, these students will have a college-level associate’s degree and, possibly, a job with IBM.
In a second initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded the the city’s Department of Education $3 million to work with CUNY to align academic standards and curriculum between high school and college. The high CUNY dropout rate, the thinking goes, stems partly from the poor preparation students receive in city schools. Ill-prepared students use limited financial aid dollars on remediation courses, instead of college credits toward a degree.
The goal is, by 2020, to raise the percentage of students finishing their associate’s degree in three years to 25 percent, and in four years to 40 percent. In a statement, the CUNY chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, called on “all K-16 educators to work together, consistently and openly” to reach every student.
Grade 16? Mr. Goldstein was using an increasingly fashionable term that attempts to underscore the continuum between college and high school, not saying high school would suddenly become interminable. The term “K-16” is also a shorthand way to refer to a movement by educators, political officials and business leaders to work together in a more systematic way to strengthen student achievement. The concept sounds good — as long as colleges do not take it literally and start asking students to raise their hand to go to the bathroom.
The Mayor’s Homework
At the start of his speech on Monday, his first major educational address of the school year, Mr. Bloomberg greeted out-of-town guests by highlighting the city’s history of top-notch alumni.
“Rain or shine, I want to welcome everyone to New York City — birthplace of four Supreme Court justices, and one on ‘American Idol,’ ” he said.
While the mayor gets bonus points for his pop cultural reference — Jennifer Lopez, a Bronx native, was just named an “American Idol” judge — there was one problem with his statement. Only three current Supreme Court justices were born here: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Antonin Scalia moved to Queens when he was 6, but he was born in Trenton.
Tenure Changes
Finally, the way the city awards teacher tenure is about to change. In his speech, the mayor said the city would now require all principals to give untenured teachers one of four ratings each year: highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. To receive tenure, which happens at the end of a teacher’s third year, a teacher must have “effective” or “highly effective” ratings for two consecutive years.
Currently, principals base tenure decisions on classroom observations and other evidence of student success, including test scores. That will not change. What’s new is the city’s commitment to develop clearer standards for what qualifies a teacher for tenure, and the need for two straight years of good marks.
Developing teachers will face a year of probation to improve, while ineffective teachers will be denied tenure and dismissed. The city’s hope is that the new system will increase the rigor of the process. This year, 89 percent of teachers got tenure, 4 percent were denied and 7 percent got an extra year to improve. In 2005, 99 percent of teachers received tenure, a number so high it led to the misnomer of “automatic tenure.” Principals, the union pointed out, have always had the right to deny tenure, for any reason.
Our Opinion
At Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective, we see too many young women who, upon graduating from high school and matriculating into college, find themselves woefully unprepared for the academic rigors of college. This trend is especially exacerbated for students attending transfer schools, alternative high schools for students who are under-credited, ove-aged students run under New York City’s Department of Education Multiple Pathways to Graduation. We have worked with transfer students who, although they graduated as valedictorians of their transfer schools, were unable to complete one semester of community college because they had not been taught the necessary skills. This is unacceptable.
We support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to mitigate this problem by aligning standards between high school and CUNY. Additionally, we support programs which extend high school to allow for more intensive preparation for college. As this is a widespread problem in the New York City school system, we must make such efforts more systematized and widespread so that all students graduate from high school with the academic skills necessary to succeed in college.
To view graduation rates for a particular CUNY program, go to http://www.collegeresults.org/.
Young Mothers' Education Policy 