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Students from the Urban Youth Collaborative present suggestions to boost college readiness before a City Council hearing on the subject.

By 2016, the proportion of students who graduate from city high schools ready for college-level work will double, Department of Education officials told skeptical City Council members today.

The ambitious projection, made during a hearing on college and career readiness, would require growth that far outstrips even the most liberal assessments of the Department of Education’s recent record of improvement.

But even then most students would not be considered “college-ready.” In 2010, when the city touted a 61 percent four-year graduation rate, just 21 percent of students who had entered high school in four years earlier met the state’s college-readiness requirements.

A disjuncture has long been visible between what city high schools require for graduation and what the City University of New York expects from new students. Three quarters of the students enrolling in CUNY’s two-year colleges must take remedial math or reading classes, and that number has risen along with college attendance rates in recent years, especially as CUNY has toughened its standards.

Testifying before members of the council’s committees on education and higher education, UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused the city of practicing “social graduation” by giving high school diplomas to students who must repeat high school-level work before starting college classes.

But until recently, high school graduation, not college readiness, was considered the gold standard for success testified Shael Polakow-Suransky, the DOE’s chief academic officer. He said school officials had been adjusting their priorities to meet rising expectations and were confident that initiatives already underway would substantially change the picture.

In particular, he said, new curriculum standards known as the Common Core that are being rolled out this year would push students to develop critical thinking skills required for college-level work. (more…)

Data from the Department of Education show which school support organizations are gaining schools and which are losing them.

Given the choice to switch to a new support organization, most schools are deciding to stay put, Department of Education data that I obtained today show. Eric Nadelstern, the city’s chief schools officer, confirmed the data in a short telephone interview.

Nadelstern said the information is “gratifying” because it indicates schools are happy with the level of service they are receiving. But he said that he hopes that in the future schools will make their decisions based not just on their own experiences, but also on data showing how well students inside each support organization’s umbrella are performing academically. (Data were released for the first time earlier this year.)

A large group schools next year will also join a trial organizational model known as the Children First Network, which tries to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical supports. Twenty networks of schools will join the Children First Network next year, Nadelstern told me. Each network includes about 20 schools, suggesting that the total number of schools moving into the Children First Network is increasing to about 490, roughly a third of all city schools. (more…)

Last month, I wrote a story for the Village Voice about the challenges facing early college schools, schools that partner with local universities to offer students a taste of college while they’re still in high school. One major challenge, I reported, is that the schools can’t always maintain space on or near the campus of their partner colleges, threatening the collaborations.

Last week, developments occurred at two of the schools I mentioned in the article that underscore the relationship between location and identity for early college schools. The Daily News reported that Middle College High School at LaGuardia Community College is likely to stay in its current home on the campus of the college because the Department of Education is moving to purchase the building. The real estate deal has not been finalized, but the department has come to an agreement with the owner, DOE spokesman Will Havemann told me on Friday.

Also on Friday, parents at an early college school in a different borough were responding to news about their school’s future location. A cadre of parents from Bronx Early College Academy traveled to City Hall Friday afternoon to protest a move planned for their school that would quadruple its distance from its partner college, Lehman College. The parents were protesting both the site, in the building of IS 166, a large middle school that is closing because of poor performance, and the process by which the DOE selected it, according to leader Annabel Wright, who estimated that about 20 parents made the trip to Lower Manhattan. (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…)