Beyond high school graduation: What the data tell us

It was welcome news earlier in March that a record 59 percent of the city’s Class of 2009 graduated on time.

But their teachers may have felt mixed emotions. As they know, the next step for the graduates they just launched is the harder one.

In New York City and many other urban districts, high school graduates are not going on to succeed in college and careers in anything like the numbers they should be. Even as more students are enrolling in colleges, the fact is that many don’t make it through.

It may come as a shock to students (though not their teachers) that state graduation standards do not include all the thinking skills and study habits they must master for college and careers.

College enrollment rates rose to 69 percent in 2005 from 49 percent in 1972, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But only a little over half of enrollees who went to school full-time actually completed a bachelor’s degree within six years.

Just 18 percent who enter community colleges get a bachelor’s degree within eight years, and many fail to make it through their first year, according to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College.

And while the high schools were increasing graduation rates, the bar rose: most decent jobs require at least two years of postsecondary education.

Misplaced objectives

New reports on college and career readiness have been highly critical of what they see as No Child Left Behind’s misplaced emphasis on adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward minimum state graduation standards. Those goals, they say, have failed to prepare students for higher-level academics and meaningful work.

“AYP has been fundamentally flawed at the high school level because of weak and inconsistent definitions of proficiency and graduation rates that are not aligned to the goal of every student graduating ready for college and a career,” wrote the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Excellent Education in its June 2009 policy brief, “Moving Beyond AYP: High School Performance Indicators.” Tests aligned to state standards “often measure basic skills, not students’ preparation for college and the work force,” the organization said.

Now that the Obama administration has vowed to replace NCLB’s goals with a standard of college and career readiness, there is a surge of interest in figuring out what that will require. It is likely to mean profound changes in high school curriculum, course-taking, organization and testing.

What the national data show

ACT, which administers a widely-used college entrance exam, has established college readiness benchmarks — minimum ACT scores that indicate probable success in key college courses. Of 1.2 million high school students who took the ACT in 2008, only 53 percent had college-ready reading skills, 43 percent met the math benchmark and 28 percent were prepared in biology. A more encouraging 68 percent were prepared in English composition. But only 22 percent were college-ready in all four areas.

There is bad news from the Advanced Placement exams as well. In 2008, only 61 percent of test-takers scored a college-ready score of 3 or higher, a decline of four percentage points from 2003.

A high school diploma doesn’t necessarily spell success for students at the university level. Algebra 2 is often described as a “gateway course” because it correlates so closely with college success. Students who complete Algebra 2 are twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree as students who do not, and passing Algebra 2 reduces the gap in college-completion rates between African American and Latino students and their white peers by half.

In 2008, the Alliance for Excellent Education reported, of 90,000 students who took an end-of-course Algebra 2 exam, the average score was 27 percent.

New York City’s status

New York City students’ most recent SAT scores averaged 435 in reading and 459 in math, well below the midrange for four-year CUNY schools of about 490 in reading and 525 in math.

This isn’t encouraging. But whether New York City’s public high school graduates are ready for college “should not be reduced to a yes or no answer,” said John Garvey, a former CUNY dean who spent years examining student data. Some students are very well prepared, some not at all. The majority are in between, he wrote in a recent study for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Math is a big problem area. While 93 percent of New York City’s high school graduates meet CUNY’s recommendations for four years of college-preparatory English, just 19 percent meet the college-prep math requirement, Garvey reported.

Merely passing the Regents at the required 65 does not indicate college readiness. Students who score under a 75 on Regents exams generally are not accepted at CUNY’s four-year colleges, because they are determined to need remediation before they can do college-level work.

Including all CUNY colleges, just 56 percent of the 2007 entering class earned a 75 or higher on the Math A Regents and 59 percent did so on the English, Garvey found. In the community colleges, more than 80 percent of students failed placement exams in reading, writing or math and were required to take remedial courses.

In a widely cited 2006 report, the U.S. Department of Education determined that having no need for remediation in college is one of four key indicators of college success.

What will help

In interviews conducted by Annenberg researchers for the Garvey report, high schoolers were found to lack exposure to what college would be like. In high school, teachers and students told the researchers, “students had been encouraged to follow ‘scripts’ — packaged instructions” and were not prepared for assignments that required “innovative responses.”

None of the interviewees doubted that students could do the work, but one young woman reported that “it would have been helpful for her to have had more courses to pick from, more discussions in her classes, more assigned work, and an academic focus beyond passing the Regents exams.”

In Garvey’s detailed analysis of CUNY data, the seeds of solutions begin to appear, and they seem to be about coursework more than testing.

“(A) focus on testing strategies diverts students and teachers from what really matters — deep analytic work in academic classes,” Garvey wrote.

His views are echoed by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which reported that the single greatest predictor of success in college is not exam scores but the quality of high school coursework, “with a particularly strong influence on the likely achievement of poor and minority students.”

A renewed emphasis on developing challenging courses, and teaching students to stretch their minds, would likely be welcomed by many teachers who have had enough of Regents prep and minimum subject standards anyway.