The Daily News printed an article showing that the.students accepted at City University Of New York (CUNY) have to take more remedial courses to prepare them for college work. In fact about 83% of students entering the City of New York community colleges last year failed placement exams and had to take remedial courses in reading, writing or math - and most graduated from city high schools, records show. Interestingly Chancellor Joel Klein, using his usual fuzzy math statistics, stated About two-thirds of students graduating from city high schools will have to take remedial courses. He also claimed that this figure has went down from previous years. Reading the article the opposite seems to be true. In 1999, when CUNY stopped offering remedial courses at its four-year colleges. The number of first-time freshman taking remedial courses has since grown 20% to about 8,700 last year.This information questions the validity of the NYC public school graduation rates. Obviously, the DOE is graduating many "not ready for college. students " who must take remedial courses before they can do college work.
The rise in remedial course work at CUNY just proves that the high school graduation rates include too many students who graduate with local diplomas (30.2%), aided and abetted by the DOE's bogus "credit recovery program" , and principals pressuring teachers to graduate undeserving students so that the school's report card would reflect progress. Even students who receive a Regents diploma are suspect because of the State's dumbing-down the Regents in many of the subjects. Obviously, the decline in City SAT scores accurately reflect the increase in remedial course work for the entering class at the CUNY community Colleges.
The gimmicks that the DOE uses to artificially increase their high school graduation rates are reflected in the huge increase in students who needed remedial course work at the CUNY community colleges and shows how bogus the DOE high school graduation rates really are.
And you can rest assured that teachers will be blamed for this.
ReplyDeleteThe community college I teach in offers a course in arithmetic. Now, that is plain sad. David Abrams, some hot shot from Board of Regents recently claimed in Newsday that kids are graduating with regents diplomas, prepared for college and life. He must be taking some heavy duty drugs to believe that.
ReplyDeleteI teach in a NYC High School. The principal at the beginning of June was going to have only 20 % of the seniors graduating. Then the grade changes started and almost 200 students graduated by this criminal action. This is what happenes when principals do not have tenure and have to produce better statistics every year
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