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Students from Generation Citizen's inaugural Civics Day (Wei Yao)

The ninth grade girls at the Urban Assembly School for Criminal Justice weren’t interested in much when Pace University junior Kayla Francis first visited  their classroom in February to discuss civics topics to research. She tossed out a few ideas – poverty, humanitarianism – until one issue finally caught their attention.

“Nothing got them as excited as women’s health,” said Francis.

Led by Francis, a mentor on the project, the group spent the next six weeks researching women’s health issues, including teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, which they said were issues in their own all-girls school.

On Friday they presented their findings – along with a plan to raise awareness  –  to a panel of about 40 judges from around the city community as part of an inaugural “Civics Day” event hosted by  Generation Citizen.

More than 500 middle and high school students from 14 schools participated in the six-week program, which is in its first year in New York City. Generation Citizen, founded by Scott Warren during his senior year at Brown University in 2008, already has similar civics programs in Boston and Providence.

New York City is no stranger to civics education programs, of course. In March, a similar event was held at the Academy for Young Writers. (more…)

Reversing a previous proposal, the Department of Education will award credit to city high schools whose students enlist in the military or enroll in “rigorous” career training programs the year after graduating.

This fall, the department is preparing to factor students’ post-graduation outcomes into schools’ annual progress report grades. When officials first devised the new metrics, which will augment performance data of students who are enrolled in the high schools, they proposed giving credit only for students who enrolled in college the semester after graduating.

In a series of feedback sessions earlier this year, principals pushed back against the narrow scope of the proposal. They argued that students who meet the military’s enlistment standards have been adequately prepared for life after high school as well.

This week, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that the department agreed with the principals — and would liberalize the metric even more by granting credit when students enroll in vocational training or public service programs such as AmeriCorps.

“This new version of the metric will reflect the diverse pathways our students pursue after graduation that lead to meaningful careers,” Walcott told principals in a weekly email message sent last night.

The switch was part of this year’s final revisions to the methodology behind the progress reports, which the city uses to decide which principals to reward and which schools to shutter. (more…)

Truman High School Principal Sana Nasser introduces a program to boost college readiness.

Harry S. Truman High School Principal Sana Nasser started making college preparation a priority long before the city began sounding the alarm about poor college readiness rates. She has encouraged students at her large Bronx school to take college level courses at the nearby Mercy College campus, and invited alumni enrolled in college to meet with current students.

But when the city assessed her efforts in its first release of data measuring how schools are preparing students for college academics, Truman fell short of the city’s already dismally low averages in all three college readiness categories. Just ten percent of Truman’s students scored high enough on advanced standardized tests to be considered “college prepared,” according to the city’s rubric.

So Nasser is trying a different approach. She has joined with Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and administrators from Mercy College to create a college readiness initiative that target all students and offer the strongest ones a chance to earn a two-year associates degree by the time they graduate from high school.

“I believe some of you can do high school in two years and take college courses,” she told an assembly of honors students in grades nine through twelve seated in the school’s spiffy, first-floor IMAX theater. (more…)

Mitch Kurz leads students through a true/false quiz about the psychology of dreams.

Mitch Kurz is a math teacher and a college counselor, but the lessons he teaches don’t fall neatly into either subject area.

On a recent winter morning, Kurz asked students in his college readiness class to describe their dreams. On the board, he wrote, “What do your dreams mean?” followed by “Sigmund Freud” and a list of vocabulary words more typical of a Psychology 101 class: id, ego, superego.

Most of Kurz’s two dozen South Bronx juniors and seniors had not heard of these concepts before. But after a semester learning a hodgepodge of lessons from Kurz meant to ease the transition to college — covering everything from the dreidel game, to basic French, to the elevator pitch — students say they come into class expecting the unfamiliar.

The class, which Kurz calls “Assimilation,” is meant to ease the transition to college for students at the Bronx Center for Science and Math, a small school with many poor students who would be the first in their families to attend college. The school emphatically urges all graduates to enroll in college, and the vast majority do — but they suffer the same academic and financial challenges that low-income, first-generation students often face. Nationally, 89 percent of those students who enter college leave without a degree within six years.

Increasing students’ likelihood of graduating from college has emerged as a major frontier in education policy. The city’s approach is to toughen high school preparation so students have a better shot of handling the rigor of college-level work. Others, such as the KIPP network of charter schools, believe the problem lies more in students’ capacity to handle challenges and have developed programs to bolster traits such as resilience and “grit” that seem correlated with college success.

At Kurz’s school, academic standards are important, and so is character. But Kurz adds an additional approach. (more…)

City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez speaks to a crowd of Washington Heights parents about college readiness Wednesday evening.

A Washington Heights politician who has been trying to get local parents talking about college readiness might have bitten off more than he can chew.

City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez has adopted a novel response to the daunting statistic that only about 13 percent of the city’s African American and Latino students are graduating from high school prepared for college: He has put together a working group of principals to get families talking about the path to college starting in kindergarten.

But at a forum Wednesday evening at I.S. 143, the first public event to come out of the working group’s suggestions, parents among the audience of 60 families, educators, and elected officials spoke mostly about more immediate concerns.

Most of the parents who spoke during the question and answer session prefaced their questions about college readiness with complaints about high class sizes and administrative problems at their schools, which drew the meeting off topic.

“There are 35 kids in our classroom and only one teacher,” one mother said. “What are the things we can do about that?” (more…)

Click on the chart for an expanded view.

A handful of the high schools the city wants to “turn around” are already doing a better-than-average job at preparing students for college. (more…)

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…)

Although the city’s new college readiness metrics were not factored into high school progress reports this year, they will be next year—and schools that don’t prepare could see drops in their grades, city officials said.

The new data points are one of the Department of Education’s answers to increased scrutiny on how public schools are preparing students for college. Criticisms have mounted against city schools for graduating students who are not college-bound, or require large doses of remedial coursework when they get to college.

But Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer, said they will not be factored into the schools’ scores until next fall because the Department of Education wants educators to have time to adjust their curriculums to meet those standards.

Until the city completely rolls out new Common Core standards, he said, instructors will have to walk a fine line between preparing students for state exams, which often require broad but shallow knowledge, and simulating college-level work with more writing assignments and long-term projects.

“We’re not waiting for the state to change its assessments, but it is a real dilemma that teachers and students face until that change occurs,” he said. “You can play around with the cut scores, but until you actually change what you ask kids to do, until you ask them to do more writing, more critical thinking, more problem-solving, engage with more rigorous texts, you’re not changing the standard. That’s the real work.”

The department hasn’t decided yet how to factor the new data points into progress report scores, Polakow-Suransky said. But he said expected the college readiness metrics to bring many grades down next year. (more…)

Nearly half of students who started ninth grade in 2006 are enrolled in college right now, but only a quarter of them were ready for it, city data shows.

The numbers were revealed today when the Department of Education released high school progress reports for last year. For the first time, the reports include data about each school’s course offerings and college enrollment rate, although that information will not be factored into schools’ grades until next year.

Schools that receive a grade of F or D, or get three C grades in a row, could face closure. This year, 41 schools received D’s or F’s, an increase over last year, while fewer high schools received A grades than in any year since the progress reports were created in 2007.

Speaking to reporters this morning, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer, attributed those changes to a tougher set of requirements around student performance on state tests, credit accumulation, and documentation for student discharges.

“I think we’re tightening things up and we’ve gotten a more precise result,” he said. (more…)

From the state's test score presentation, a slide that shows gains in New York City that exceeds that of other cities.

A first look at state test score data confirms good news for New York City: The city’s test scores gains exceeded those across the state.

According to data released today, 43.9 percent of city students in grades 3-8 met the proficiency standard in reading and 57.3 percent hit the math proficiency standard. That’s compared to 42.4 percent and 54 percent in 2010, the first year after state officials raised the bar to reach that rating.

Statewide, reading scores dropped by a tiny amount — 0.4 percentage points — to 52.8 percent proficient, and math scores rose by 2.3 points, to 63.3 percent proficient.

State officials sounded a somber tone in their press release announcing the scores. “While the majority of students statewide met or exceeded the state’s proficiency standards in both math and ELA, overall performance remains low and the gaps in achievement persist,” the press release said.

Mayor Bloomberg is likely to point to city students’ relative performance during his press conference later today.

But the big story this year is not the scores but the tests themselves. (more…)