The Disconnect Between Graduation Rates And Being Academically Proficient.

It appears that no matter who is Mayor, be it Michael Bloomberg or Bill de Blasio, they only care about the graduation rate and not whether these graduates were academically proficient to make it in higher education or the business world. To make matters worse, high school report cards are geared to two major metrics, credit accumulation and graduation rate, on the other hand, the "college and career readiness" metric is only supplied for informational reasons.  While the "college and career readiness" metric may not be the best metric to use to determine academic achievement, its the only metric that principals and schools cannot easily manipulate.  Moreover, this metric is closely correlated with the need for students to take no-credit remedial courses in college.

The primary importance is to make the general public and especially parents of students that their schools are succeeding academically, the main emphasis by school administrators is to improve the graduation rate by any means possible.That includes "credit recovery",  online programs, blended learning, scholarship requirements, and administrative pressure on teachers to pass otherwise failing students.  In other words, teachers that fail too many students will be subject to poor observations and in a worst-case scenario, termination under 3020-a.

Listed below you can see how disconnected it is between the City's graduation rates when compare to the school's "college ready"for most of the Queens high schools..

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

Rockaway Park.........................54%.....................2%
August Martin...........................42%.....................2%
QIRT........................................55%.....................7%
Fredrick Douglas Academy VI....45%.....................8% 
Science, Research, and Tech......65%....................12%
Humanities and Arts.................76%.....................13%
Rockaway Collegiate.................53%....................14% 
Martin Van Buren......................55%....................14%
Richmond Hill...........................55%....................16%
Law Enforcement.....................74%....................17%
Newtown.................................59%....................18%
John Adams.............................62%....................20%
Academy of Medical Tech..........64%....................20% 
Pathways College....................70%....................21%
Flushing..................................58%....................21%
Cambria Heights Academy.......73%....................22%
Long Island City.......................65% ...................23%
Excelsior Prep.........................75%....................24%
Grover Cleveland.....................63%....................27%
Writer's Academy....................76%....................27%
Hillside Arts & Letters..............81%....................28%
Queens Prep...........................76%....................28%
George Washington Carver......74%....................28%
Channel View..........................85%....................28%
Information & Technology........78%....................29%
Community Leadership............84%....................31%
Hillcrest.................................76%....................32%
Queens Vocational..................80%....................33% 
Queens HS of Teaching............91%....................34%
Middle College HS...................66%.....................35%
William Cullen Bryant..............68%....................35% 
John Bowne............................70%....................37%
Applied Communications.........82%....................38%
Arts And Business...................90%....................39% 
Robert H. Goodard...................92%....................41%
Queens Collegiate...................78%....................46%
Metropolitan HS......................92%....................47%
Robert F. Kennedy...................84%....................47%
Maspeth HS............................97%....................50%
Forest Hills.............................88%....................56%
Bayside..................................92%...................58%
Cardozo..................................91%...................64%
Civic Leadership......................87%...................66%
Francis Lewis..........................88%...................71%
Finance & Enterprise...............94%...................76%

What is most obvious is the high ratio between the graduation rate and the "college ready" metric.  For example Rockaway Park and August Martin have the highest ratio being 27 and 21 respectively.  While the lowest is Francis Lewis and the Academy of Finance and Enterprise  at 1.2.   The average ratio for all the schools listed is 2.45.   Meaning that for every five students who graduate, only two are prepared academically.  Intentionally left out of this study were the screened and selective schools who cherry pick  only the high achieving students ( ratios close to 1) as well as the international schools since they attract recent immigrants do not have the same demographics as most Queens schools.  Just looking at the data, schools that have a graduation rate to college ready ratio of less than 2 are the schools that have a high priority in real academic achievement while schools with ratios higher than 3 seem to be more interested in pushing out failing students by graduating them academically unprepared for the adult world.

In conclusion, good schools have low graduation to college ready rates, the closer to 1.0, the better the school is, while schools that have a ratio over 3 should be avoided at all costs.