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.

“It’s not just about getting to a number on a test,” Polakow-Suransky said. ”It’s about resilience, persistence, being able to use your mind well, being able to think critically to solve unfamiliar problems.”

Officials also said they are optimistic about plans Mayor Bloomberg sketched out in his State of the City speech last week to open more schools that bridge high school and college instruction and expand the city’s career and technical education high schools, which are designed to prepare students to choose between college and entering the workforce.

Since 2008, CUNY and the DOE have swapped data about students in order to learn more about what it takes to prepare high schoolers for success in college. Now, collaboration between the two school systems “is the strongest it’s ever been,” testified John Mogulescu, a dean in charge of CUNY’s relationship with the city schools.

But Mogulescu said the two institutions had also demonstrated a “joint failure” to let students know just how challenging college is, adding that CUNY would soon launch a public awareness campaign to explain college readiness.

“We think it is the responsibility of our admissions folks to work more with the community,” he said. “I am as impatient as you are to make the kinds of changes you are talking about.”

The hearing drew protest from the Urban Youth Collaborative and Coalition for Educational Justice, activists and students who held a press conference to call attention to even lower rates of college readiness among black and Latino students and to demand that the city invest more in college preparation initiatives.

Council members echoed many of the students’ suggestions, championing the College Now program that allows high school students to take CUNY courses before graduating and urging the department to provide more one-on-one counseling about college admissions and financial aid. Some guidance counselors work with as many as 500 students at a time, said Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee.

Dolores Fernandez, the Bronx's appointee to the re-formed Board of Education, appearing on BronxTalk.

Graduates of the city’s public high schools are falling so behind in reading and math that a community college remediation program doubled in size between 1998 and 2008, the college’s former president said this week.

Dolores Fernandez, who resigned from Hostos Community College last year is now serving as the Bronx borough president’s appointee to the re-formed Board of Education, made the remarks in an interview on a Bronx television news program, BronxTalk.

“I would have loved for the New York City public schools to put my remediation programs out of business, because that would mean that every kid graduating out of the schools could read, write, and do math,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez said that a hiking up of standards at CUNY’s four-year colleges played some part in the growth of Hostos’s remediation program. “But then you still have the regular group of kids who just are coming to us in need of a GED diploma, because they haven’t graduated from the public schools, and when we get them, we’re basically teaching them reading, writing, and math — I mean, basic levels,” she said.

The gloomy picture challenges Bloomberg’s own claims about the public schools, which state figures show now graduate far more students since 2002. But Fernandez said she does not trust these figures as a fair picture of what is really happening, especially for the poor Latino community she served at Hostos Community College.

You can watch the interview in the full two parts below.

UPDATE: Department of Education spokesman Andrew Jacob points out in the comments section that a growing remediation program does not mean that more city students are struggling. His argument:

the size of the program doesn’t tell you anything about the percentage of graduates who required remediation, because the number of public school graduates enrolling at CUNY community colleges has risen dramatically in recent years–70% between 2002 and 2008. Among Hispanic public school graduates, enrollment doubled over that same time period.

With this many more students enrolling, of course the remediation program would expand, even if the percentage of graduates needing remediation fell. And, in fact, that percentage has fallen across all CUNY community colleges, from 82 percent in 2002 to 74 percent in 2008. Among all CUNY colleges, the remediation rate for public school graduates has fallen from 58% to 51%.

The criticisms could end up being moot if mayoral control returns, and Fernandez said that she does not expect to serve on the Board of Education for long. Even if the board does last, it’s unclear how much influence Fernandez would have. She is by far its most critical member; others include three deputy mayors and borough appointees who have vowed to support Chancellor Joel Klein.

She also challenged Bloomberg’s depiction of the city’s high school graduation rate, which according to state figures has risen among black and Latino students. Fernandez said of the figures, “Their data is very interesting.” Then she described her own experience working with students:

“I come from a Latino community, and the kids that I serve were low socioeconomic kids — those graduation rates aren’t up,” she said. “Okay, they aren’t up. If anything, they are status quo or they have gone down.”

State figures show that the graduation rate among Latino students rose to 48.7% in 2008, from 37.4% in 2005.

Fernandez also said that Bloomberg has discouraged creative teachers. “I don’t think I could teach today in the New York City public schools. I think I would be stifled because I was very open in my classroom,” she said. “I gave kids a lot of flexibility. It might have looked like kids weren’t learning, but, you know, when the outcomes came on tests, my kids did just as well as the other kids.”

Some other notable points: she argued that the new Board of Education, in its one and only meeting so far, did not follow proper parliamentary procedure; that Klein has communicated no “vision” for the public schools; and gave a fascinating explanation of how she turned around Hostos, making it financially solvent and creating nine Calculus classes, up from zero when she took over.

Here’s part one of the interview:

And part two: