Shame of the City III: city schools are not preparing NYC students for college

As it has been put before, the key question is:
"Is Our Children Learning?" [har, har] and the answer is No. Read on.

WNYC's Beth Fertig has an important story today on the station's website:

NYC students are ill-prepared for real college life.

NEW YORK, NY September 24, 2009 —A new study finds too many New York City high school students aren't prepared for college, and urges the state and city to take action. WNYC's Beth Fertig has more.

REPORTER: The study by the Annenberg Institute for School reform looked at students at the City University. More students are entering CUNY and fewer need remedial classes. But most students in community colleges still need remedial math or English; and the six-year graduation rate for an associate degree is less than 29 percent. Researchers say the problem lies in the lack of college readiness. They say state standards aren't well aligned to what students need to succeed. And too many students don't take four full years of math and science. The report urges public schools and colleges to collaborate in guiding students, so they'll know what they need in college. It also says students often don't aim higher on their Regents exams because they don't understand that they need a score of at least 75 to avoid remedial classes later. For WNYC I'm Beth Fertig.

A major crux of the problem is that high enough math standards are not being pursued with the students. Students' actual grade level in math and English lag at least two grade levels, throughout their careers, particularly as the tween years transition to adolescent years, i.e., in fifth grade. This lag is really not acceptable if the city expects students to have "on-par" literacy and "numeracy" by the college freshman year.
Let's look at how the basic skills are not honed in English and math. The city denigrates the focus on the fundamental ability to construct clear, grammatically sentences or spelling skills. The city subscribes --far more aggressively under Klein-- progressive education ideologies. It has allowed those ideologies to elide the development of the basic skills of written expression. In the crucial years of fifth through nine, when this skills should be refined in students, the city dogmatically avoids addressing these skills.
Regarding math, Klein's administration gullibly bought, hook, line and sinker, the constructivist dictates that students learn math best by developing theories and trying some experimentation. The city wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on worthless textbooks on the discredited "Everyday Math" and "Impact Math" series specializing in this avant garde nonsense. California experimented with this New New Math nuttiness almost two decades ago, and it rejected it with passion. Yet, the city has ruined the basic math skills of nearly a generation of students by using these approaches since 2002. (For more analysis of these discredited trends, visit the website of the venerable Thomas B. Fordham Institute.)
For those unfamiliar with graduation routines from New York State schools, final summation tests in the various academic subjects are administered in high school, mainly in ninth through eleventh grades. The bar is ridiculously lowered for the most commonly taken Math A Regents exam. Just try this January 2009 version of the test on your own, without any preparation. Most of it appears on the level of sixth or seventh grade math.

The education analysts that responded to the aforementioned reporter said that more years of math are needed in high school. Yes, maybe, but prior to that goal, they need to master pre-algebra fundamentals.

To boot, the state has lowered the passing score for one Regents exam, to make the question of judging passing scores, as the New York Times reports, even more suspicious, particularly when we are in the era of Bloomberg/Klein reform.

Further, the city schools have adopted the progressive education dictum that school must be fun and cooperative, well into high school. Thus, they coddle impulses of informality and they withhold the development of skills, mental and behavioral attitudes upon which high performance in the college level depnds. Walking around the classroom is sought as part of the lesson. Group-work is mandated.
Are these the modes of rigor in college? Are these habits that are constructive for working alone, and concentrating for long periods, on a test at the college level? No, no, no. Yet, Bloomberg/Klein have adopted and enforced this silliness that is doubtless not used in Singapore or Denmark.

The Mis-rule of Joel Klein that NY Times has ignored

On the New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein, there are major problems in news media reportage, except for WNYC and a couple of reporters for the tabloids, the city's media (notably, the New York Times) are merely repeating the press releases of the city Department of Education.

This is a terrible civic example to the children and the public. In history classes there are warnings against the concentration of power in one person. It is called autocracy, the word is treated as a dirty word. Yet, there is no critical discussion of the ills of this kind of leadership.
As to specifics of his mis-leadership,
1) Klein has misallocated resources into no-bid contracts for consultants. Millions have been spent on these consultants, while schools have scrimped on teaching staff and resources.
2) On January 21, 2003, Klein adopted the misguided "Everyday Math" program. This poorly conceived constructivist approach to teaching math was twice (several years prior) rejected in California after careful studies of the program. (See the New York Sun and the City Journal on this issue; and this assessment by David Klein, a California professor of mathematics.)
3) He has exerted a social class bias in closing down schools. The closed schools has happened extensively in schools with high minority and low income student populations in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. It has not happened in southern Brooklyn, eastern Queens or Staten Island. In the wide-spread closure of large schools he has foreclosed the opportunity for students to have options in their English classes, their foreign language choices or chances to study in Advanced Placement classes. Now, there is no possibility of taking AP classes, there is only one choice (within one grade within a school) of English class topic or foreign language. No more French, German or Italian, just Spanish.
4) The city has neglected to provide special education resources (special education-certified teachers and classes) in schools. Now, special education students are injected into regular education classes. As students and teachers will tell you, this move often leads to greater disruption in the class. This neglect of special education has forced the United Federation of Teachers to launch a campaign for monitoring the denial of special education resources.
Why the neglect of special education resources? For one matter, the appearance of large percentages of special education students in schools is seen as a negative indicator. The solution? Just erase the special education students.
5) The graduation rates are a distortion. As WNYC reported in May, a Columbia School of Journalism PhD candidate (Jennifer Jennings) showed that the number of high school graduates does not match the number of in-coming ninth graders. Before Klein, students had the opportunity re-take classes. True, it was common for students to take six years to graduate. At least this was better than being pressured to leave the school for commercial trade schools or GED programs. A real Regents high school diploma is better than a GED certificate.
6) The value of a New York City public education remains troubled. The CUNY schools are having to put the vast majority of NYC school graduates through remedial education in English and mathematics.

These comments address just the beginning of the ways that Klein has mis-served the city. These examples of wrong-headed policies would have been addressed *publicly* had they been subject to open discussion by an independent body. The Senate is to be praised for not renewing mayoral control. After seven years, it is a demonstrated failure. Bravo to Brooklyn's Senator John Sampson for aiming to have greater variety of voices on the new Board. Let's hope that the new Board will have some real independence and power.