Saturday, February 02, 2019

The Disconnect Between The Graduation Rate And The College Readiness Rate - 2018


























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High schools that have a ratio less than "1.2" are in blue and giving their students a world class education while high schools with ratios greater than "1.5" are listed in red and yellow and are simply diploma mills. Parents should make sure their academically achieving students should stay away from them.  This year's metric was lowered since the CUNY college readiness metric was lowered and the Algebra Regents rubric and cut scores were made easier to achieve higher grades and the English Regents was found also to be easier than previous years.  It appears the "college ready" scores went up  again by an average of fifteen points, primarily due to the lower cut scores in Math and an easier test in English.

We all know that principals can and do manipulate the graduation rate.   Credit recovery, grade changing, administration pressure on teachers, and school scholarship requirements (80% or more passing per class) or a combination of them all.  The result is an artificially bogus graduation rate as far too many schools graduate students unprepared for the real world.  Therefore, to determine if  unscreened Queens high schools are really diploma mills or truly giving their students a real world class education, I have developed the annual metric for the 2017-18 school year that takes the graduation rate and divides it by the college readiness percentage.

The list is based on the 2017-18 school year.

School...........................Graduation Rate.....College Ready

Cambria Heights Academy........83%....................39% 
Academy of Medical Tech..........73%....................27% 
Fredrick Douglas Academy VI....43%....................11%
Epic HS South...........................67%....................32%
Benjamin Franklin.....................80%....................44%
QIRT........................................82%....................50%
Rockaway Park.........................67%....................36%
Humanities and Arts.................80%....................43%
August Martin...........................72%....................28% 
Rockaway Collegiate.................67%....................26% 
Martin Van Buren......................72%....................28%
 Flushing..................................62%....................32%
Pathways College.......'.............69%....................28%
Hillside Arts & Letters...............88%....................52%
Law Enforcement.....................79%....................38%
Science, Research, and Tech.....71%....................47%
Excelsior Prep..........................81%....................52% 
 George Washington Carver.......75%...................39%
 John Adams............................72%....................42%
Queens Prep............................67%....................39% 
Grover Cleveland.....................63%....................40%  
Epic HS North..........................88%....................57%
R
ichmond Hill..........................71%....................42%
Long Island City......................76% ...................46%

Applied Communications..........87%....................56%
 Hillcrest.................................71%....................44%
 Queens HS of Teaching............91%....................53%
 Community Leadership...........91%....................47%
Queens Collegiate...................88%....................56%
 William Cullen Bryant..............71%....................52%
 Newtown...............................73%.....................57%
 Robert  H. Goddard.................97%....................71%
 Robert Wagner.......................91%....................65%
John Bowne............................77%....................55%
Channel View..........................97%....................76%
Writers Academy....................89%.....................62%
Information & Technology.......79%.....................60%
Robert F. Kennedy..................80%.....................60% 
Robert Wagner.......................91%.....................66% 
Arts & Business......................94%....................79%
World Journalism....................97%....................75%
Queens Vocational..................86%....................70%
TV & Media.............................98%....................73%
Metropolitan HS......................91%....................84% 
Middle College HS....................91%...................77%
Civic Leadership......................92%...................82% 
Maspeth HS............................98%....................86%
Forest Hills.............................91%....................81%
Bayside..................................99%....................87%
East-West..............................93%....................81%
Cardozo.................................89%....................74%
Thomas Edison.......................92%....................82%
Francis Lewis.........................88%....................80%
Finance & Enterprise...............97%....................84% 


 The citywide "college ready" average is 53%. "college and career readiness rate"  as defined by New York City  The more stringent New York State rates are lower.

 Obviously, the lowest rated schools are "diploma mills" and for the most part, are located in Southeast Queens or are "Renewal schools".  By contrast the best schools are located in two areas  Northeast Queens and the Long Island City/Astoria area.  The Bloomberg small schools in the Far Rockaway and Beach Channel campuses inhabit most of the top positions with the worst matrices on the list, while the worst school metric is by Fredrick Douglas Academy VI with a metric of 3.9.. By contrast, the best two schools Bayside and Francis Lewis, when it comes to the metric.

The takeaway is that all the high schools in the Far Rockaway, Beach Channel, and Campus Magnet campuses are academic failures and the Springfield Gardens campus is not far behind.  Moreover, the Jamaica Educational Complex is showing gradual deterioration with two school already failing and the one of the other unscreened school showing a significant drop.

While my metric is not perfect it serves as a useful guide for parents who want the right Queens high school for their academically proficient student. You can see the metrics for the last three years  Here, Here and Here.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good comparison. Not to get too technical, but one other important number is what % of the kids graduating are special ed. A school with a high % of special ed kids in the graduating cohort could have a high grad rate (due to all the new appeals and waivers for special ed students) but few of them will get the 70+ on a math regents or 75+ on the english regents because they refuse to retest once they got their safety net (55-64) or compensatory (45-54) score and so never get college ready status. Many of the parents of these kids refuse to have the kid retest due to "stress" when its really they don't want to deal with the kid screaming.
Another important number the DOE ignores is the number of kids in the grad cohort for a school. Some schools have 900+ kids to graduate, some of less than 90. The smaller the school is the more likely it gets 100% FSF and additional funding. The big guys you mentioned like Francis Lewis and Bayside are at the bottom of the funding ladder.
Great blog-read you every day!

Anonymous said...

The biggest scam is the Queens HS for Teaching. The school has two way mirrors in the classrooms and no one will tell an ATR about them......no shit.

Anonymous said...

Chaz, who the hell do you think you are to call my school an academic fraud. You are implying that I and other teachers are not doing our jobs. I put hours of work in trying to move our students who come in at 3rd and 4th grade reading levels. WE work our butts off to move them a few grade levels within the four year window, which is a miracle and success in itself. Yet you sit on your high horse and tell me my hard work amounts to academic fraud because they didn't get a 70-75 on the Math/ELA regents. F--k you Chaz! Always pointing fingers, as if you could do better yourself.

Chaz said...

Anon 10:34

Who's faun is it that these students who have elementary school skills are expected to do high school work?

That's why social promotion does not work since the blame lies with the school administrators and teachers at the lower grades.

The bottom line is that who ever are the blame, the students are not prepared for college or careers. Just ask any business who will tell you that many of them cannot fill out a job application or do simple Math.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Chaz, I agree with you. I am a high school teacher in a failing school and am appalled by the lack of skills the students of the school have.

My school is a majority Black school with most of the students native to this country. the blame for their lack of skills can be blamed on the parents and the elementary schools who both fail in their mission to educate the children.

Anonymous said...

hey 10:34

Who's fault is it that these students are not academically proficient?

Jonathan Halabi said...

I'm concerned that your metric makes School A with an 80% graduation rate and a 75% college readiness rate a better school than School B with an 85% graduation rate and a 65% college readiness rate. School B clearly does something with the kids who they could not get up to "college ready" - School A seems to kick them to the curb.

If there were a school on this list that was aiming for "graduate, not college ready" instead of "graduate, college ready" as its primary goal, that would be worth calling out.

Otherwise you probably just have a list reverse-ranked by income.

Jonathan

Chaz said...

Jonathan

My metric is not fool proof but it does allow parents to visualize schools that encourage students to achieve their goals, be it college or a high paying job.

I'm open to suggestions for a better metric that is not based on a complex mathematical equation.

Jonathan Halabi said...

Those college ready numbers are the ones that correlate most closely to the zip codes. So let's look at what happens to the kids who are not college ready. About half should graduate - way under this, and the school may be ignoring it's weakest performers - way over this and the school may fall into the "mill" category. Let me try this for your schools in Queens, and again in the Bronx, and see if the results make sense.

Jonathan

Anonymous said...

I would like to point out specifically Maspeth hs which has stellar numbers. As someone who worked there teachers are NOT allowed to fail any student. A good chunk of kids have IEPs and a third of the school follows the ICT model. Don’t be fooled by the 98% graduation rate. It’s all lies. We were threatened if we dared to fail any student, especially if they had an IEP.

I suspect the same may be true for some of the other schools on the list.

Anonymous said...

How is the college and career percent achieved? I think these numbers are inflated, also.