"While students should be praised for higher graduation rates, today's release still highlights serious problems that cannot be ignored.
"Rather than boast about an incremental increase, Mayor de Blasio should humbly talk about what additional work is needed to address the achievement gap, dropping ELL achievement, low college readiness and the incredibly uneven quality among high schools.
"He must also tackle the issue of inflated rates -- at the school where he's making the announcement, the 84% graduation rate masks a 28% college readiness level," said StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis.
Here are some areas that Mayor de Blasio must do better on:
- While the achievement gap has gotten incrementally better, it is still unacceptably large.
- The ELL graduation rate has dropped by 10 points (according to SED it was 41% in 2015 and is now 31%) and the ELL dropout rate has increased to 27% from 21.6% -- what accounts for this change?
- The college readiness rate remains unacceptably low and there are still 73 high schools with single digit college readiness levels.
- There are still diploma mill high schools with inflated graduation stats that mask horrible college readiness rates, for example:
- Repertory Company High School for Theatre Arts had a grad rate of 98% vs. 18% College Readiness Index (CRI)
- Brooklyn School for Music & Theatre had a grad rate of 90% vs.12% CRI
- Bronx Early College Academy for Teaching & Learning had a grad rate of 93% vs. 18% CRI
- The Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance had a grad rate of 72% vs. 0% CRI
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StudentsFirstNY is a grassroots education advocacy organization dedicated to improving public schools throughout New York State.
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