Queens is home to city's worst high school

From the NY Post:

They don’t want no education — especially if it’s at August Martin HS in Queens.

The troubled Springfield Gardens school is the least popular in the entire city, Department of Education statistics show.

Under New York’s open-enrollment system, all middle-schoolers apply to attend the high school of their choice. For academic powerhouses like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, the number of students who want to get in far exceeds the number of seats.

But so few asked to be placed in August Martin that it still has room to accept 774 students, DOE records revealed.

That number exceeds the 445 freshman seats August Martin normally has, since the DOE expects even students who pick the school in the second round to drop out or go somewhere else.

The DOE refused to say how many students have been assigned to the school for the fall so far.

It raises the question why August Martin is still in business, considering it had a dismal 39 percent graduation rate in 2013 and got an “F” in student performance and progress.

The school also has a reputation for violence. Students committed at least 72 offenses in the 2011-2012 school year, including eight assaults, two sex offenses and 19 instances of intimidation, state records show.

High schools still graduating unprepared students

From the NY Post:

A stunning 77.6 percent of NYC public-high-school graduates who entered CUNY community colleges as freshmen last fall needed remediation in math, reading or writing, new data show.

Despite their high-school diplomas, the grads failed CUNY admission tests in one or more of the key subjects, officials told The Post.

The only good news: The number of unprepared city grads dipped a modest 1.7 percentage points from 2012, when 79.3 percent of entering students needed to bone up on basics.

In releasing the damning data, CUNY cited success with a pre-community-college program it started four years ago to tackle the flood of unready students.

“CUNY Start” takes mostly high-school grads who fail at least two admission tests. They agree to postpone enrollment for up to six months to focus on raising their skills. Upon completion, about 70 percent pass a test they failed before, and 48 percent become “fully proficient,” or college ready, ­officials said Friday.

The abundance of ill-prepared grads is cited as evidence that city schools have handed out credits like candy to push kids along and out.

More high school dropouts than reported

From the Daily News:

The state controller ripped the city for downplaying the school dropout rate in an audit released Tuesday.

The city's rate was actually as high as 16.5% for general education students in the class of 2008 - three points higher than the city reported, the audit found.

The dropout rate for special education students was as high as 23.8%, while the city reported a 17.2% dropout rate.

"The city school system needs to sharpen its pencils when it comes to knowing which kids are dropping out and which kids are transferring to another school," said state Controller DiNapoli in a statement.

"(The education department) should be doing its homework and making sure the right papers are turned in to back up the reasons why students are leaving school."

The audit also found that the city's graduation rate was lower than reported. For general education students, it was as low as 62.9%, versus the 65.5% graduation rate reported that year.

Thompson to Bloomie: "Liar, liar pants on fire!"

From the NY Post:

Mayoral candidate Bill Thompson Jr. today said the Bloomberg administration inflated graduation rates by letting students graduate without finishing all their requirements.

But Mayor Bloomberg's campaign said graduation rates rose just 2.7 percentage points when Thompson was on the Board of Education in the late 1990s.

The mayor says the graduation rate has risen 9.9 points since 2005, the year the state began calculating it the way it currently does.

Well then you can't really make the comparison, can you Bloomturd? How do you explain graduation rates rising when there are so many more bad teachers?

And would you want to send your kids to schools overseen by the man in the photo? Does that make for a smart choice of photo to display on a campaign website?

Are Bloomberg and Klein lying about graduation rates?

From the Times Ledger:

The city Department of Education and the public advocate’s office are at odds over whether city graduation rates have been inflated during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure after Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum released a report last Thursday that calls into question why discharged students are not counted in graduation rate statistics.

Graduation rates have skyrocketed 12 percentage points from 51 percent in 2002, when Bloomberg took control of the schools, to 63 percent in 2007, according to city statistics.

Written by Jennifer Jennings, a doctoral student at Columbia University, and Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, a group that advocates for more checks on mayoral control of schools, the report states these graduation numbers would be “substantially” lower should the statistics include discharged students, or pupils who leave the school system without graduating.

Students can be labeled as discharged for a wide variety of reasons, including transferring to a school outside the city or entering a parochial institution.

The number of students discharged rose from 17.5 percent for the graduating class of 2000 to more than 20 percent for the class of 2007.

DOE spokesman Andy Jacob said more than 90 percent of discharges are students who leave for benign reasons, such as moving out of the city.

But critics of the school system said school officials can misuse the discharge policy and enter student drop−outs as discharges in order to artificially inflate the graduation rate.