One of the metrics the DOE and politicians love to use is the graduation rate. Every year the graduation inches up and everybody praises the heavens for the apparent improvement. However, when I looked at the snapshot of the Queens High Schools, I found that there was a real; disconnect between the graduation rate and the "college and career readiness" rate. Why is that important? Its important because it shows that far too many students are graduating unprepared for high education and for good paying jobs. A recent study shows that a college graduate makes 56% more money than a high school graduate and every year the gap widens, that's why the "college and career readiness" metric is an important metric for a student's financial success.
While disappointing Chancellor Carmen Farina may keep claiming how academically the schools are improving, her policies and the poor administrative quality at Tweed and in the schools suggest otherwise. In most of the high schools in the Bronx and the deep poverty communities in Southeast Queens and Eastern Brooklyn the "college and career readiness" rates are in single digits while graduating 70% or more of the students. In other words, these schools are graduating students unprepared for the adult world.
Previously, I came up with a simple ratio to determine if the high schools are giving their students a real education or simply an academic fraud factory. You can find the list for all unscreened Queens school Here. As one can see, looking at the list, the schools located in solidly middle class neighborhoods attract a racially diverse student body and has a stable and an experienced teaching staff. By contrast, the schools with the worst numbers have a nearly 100% minority student population, suffers from high teacher turnover, and an inexperienced teaching staff. Add that to the poor quality of the school administration and the many over-the-counter- students these schools must accept to keep their school afloat and you have a recipe for educational disaster.
With the present policies implemented by Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein still in place, like the school-based fair student funding, the ATR crisis, and student free choice at the high school level, I see little real change to our student educational needs as inequality between the haves and have nots will continue and students who are stuck in poorly performing high schools like the Renewal schools will have a dim future when it comes to financial success.
4 comments:
The DOE doesn't care about the kids. Administrators don't care about the kids. All they want us to do is hour after hour of insignificant paperwork that is a massive time sucker. Do we have data, and curriculum maps, and unit plans that make it appear that admin is cracking the whip on the teachers? Will administration come out smelling like a rose on Quality Review? The kids are coming up lower and lower every single year- they count on their fingers, they can't read, and they can't process. They aren't ready for middle school, let alone high school.
I work in one of those Queen's schools where we graduate a whopping 80% of our students. Most leave the school with 4th or 5th grade skill levels, but everyone make a big show of how they are 'geniuses." The clueless, young social justice warrior teachers actually think that the second grade work Laquanisha and Pablo are doing is 'awesome, like woke you know!'
The older teachers, all four of us in a staff of almost 40, see the games the admins play, the false hope of the youngins' and the unrealistic coddling the students receive, and we privately lament the end of Western civilization.
6:25 hit one important nail on the head: all the paperwork, insane amounts of it, are designed to make the admins look good. Our SQR is coming in about 6 weeks. The admins here are maniacally beating us to have our lessons (all parts of them) ready 4-5 weeks in ADVANCE. The staff is largely bewildered and the kids are suffering. The admins change the 'instructional model' with the winds coming from the reformers. Last year we changed our school's focus three times. (We started with all art, all the time, then went to Freyer models all the time, then went to essay writing all the time.
This year we shifted from project-based learning to focus on vocabulary. It's nuts and the kids see the big random shifts. The DOE HQ is full of clueless people who just want their paychecks. Teachers suffer. Kids suffer. The parents are lied to. Our future is grim.
Management is full of vicious people.
I subbed last summer U won't say what borough but I will say, 6th and 8th graders were clumped into my class room and I was directed to give them all 6th grade packets.�� I wasnt prepped prior to summer school starting, I was just thrown in. About 2 weeks in I was given English text book that covered 6-8 grade. I had to figure out lesson plans n timing on my own. They had me covering math for a couple days, but I am not a math teacher nor is it my forte'. Week 3 they hired a math teacher and finally was able to split the 6 & 8th grade. No computers, resources, nothing where are the summer funds and why isn't anyone auditing how the funding is spent?
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