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New data from the College Board on last year’s class of graduating seniors shows that while more city students are taking and passing Advanced Placement courses, black students are still underrepresented in both groups.

From 2009 to 2010, the number of New York City high school seniors taking at least one AP test increased by six percent from roughly 13,697 to 14,522. That was matched by a slight increase of 6.8 percent in the number of students who passed at least one test during high school. It’s impossible to say what the overall passage rate was, as the city’s data doesn’t indicate how students performed on the exams they took.

Those gains have been made mainly by Asian and Hispanic students. Both groups are taking Advanced Placement tests and passing them at significantly higher rates than in the past, while participation and passage rates among white students have stagnated. (more…)

SAT scores of city public school students rose slightly over last year’s scores, bringing a four-year trend of declining performance to an end, according to data released by the Department of Education today.

The average city SAT score was five points higher on the reading portion of the test, four points higher on the math, and two points higher for writing. The gains are statistically significant, but not yet great enough to cancel out several years of loses. Today, the city’s average scores to roughly where they were two years ago.

City students’ average score was 439 out of 800 on the reading section, 462 on math, and 434 on writing.

The score increases are mainly due to improved results from Asian, white, and Hispanic students. Black students’ scores stagnated, except in the case of the writing SAT, where they fell by three points. (more…)

More city public school graduates are enrolling at City University of New York Colleges, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and CUNY President Matt Goldstein boasted at a press conference last month. But whether the students are prepared for the college experience, both in and outside the classroom, is much less clear.

Only 7.5% of students take all of the high school courses that CUNY recommends, and more than 70% of the first-year students in CUNY’s junior colleges must take remedial courses to catch up on basic skills, according to John Garvey, who was until recently the dean in charge of CUNY’s College Now program, which allows high school students to take college-level courses. Garvey presented the information at an event Tuesday held by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which is developing a set of recommendations for how to boost student achievement.

One major problem is that the most advanced high school courses, called Regents courses to match the exit exams students must pass, do not approximate the style or difficulty of college classes, Garvey said. CUNY freshmen are exempted from remedial courses if they score a 75 on the math and English Regents exams. But the tests focus on material that should be learned in middle school and the first years of high school, Garvey said. “They don’t align with the real needs of college courses,” he said. (more…)

Both the mayor and the chancellor have now issued statements boasting about gains on Advanced Placement exams, the rigorous tests that are considered a good indicator of whether students are prepared for college. But the picture is more complex than they suggest, and if anything the evidence adds to concerns raised yesterday about college preparedness, particularly among black and Hispanic students.

More students are definitely taking the exams than were in 2002, whether you look at the sheer numbers — a total of 23,600 students took the tests in 2008, up from less than 17,000 in 2002 — or at proportions — in 2008, about 23% of eleventh- and twelfth-graders took AP exams, up from 21% in 2002.*

But, as I suggested yesterday, the increased participation has led to a lower pass rate:

(more…)

Last year, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said he wanted to increase the number of students passing Advanced Placement tests. But for high-achieving kids with special needs, taking AP classes can be near impossible.

This week, I talked to a parent about how hard it was for her to find a high school that says it will offer AP classes to her child, a high-achieving eighth-grader who is legally required to be placed in a team-teaching setting.

Specifically, this student must be in a Collaborative Team Teaching class, where two teachers, one with special education certification, work with a class made up of some students who have special needs and some who do not.

Despite her careful research, the mother told me, it hasn’t always been clear which high schools will meet her child’s needs. In the high school directory released each year by the DOE, most selective schools say they will offer special education services “as needed.” Some schools have reputations for including kids with all kids of special needs in their most challenging courses, but others do not. (more…)