December72009
Report shows wide disparity in college achievement »
Article from the post about success rates in college. Some clips:
*About 45 percent of low-income and underrepresented minority students entering as freshmen in 1999 had received bachelor’s degrees six years later at the colleges studied, compared with 57 percent of other students.
*Only 7 percent of minority students who entered community colleges received bachelor’s degrees within 10 years.
*BUT! Giving kids the money they need to pay for school helps: Pell recipients at community colleges completed their studies at a rate of 32 percent, the same as other students. Pell students who transferred to four-year colleges also graduated at the same rate, 60 percent, as other students.
Tags: /achievement gap /college readiness /money
November192009
excited about college?!
Today I took my advisory group - about 12 9th grade girls - to Barnard and Columbia for the day as part of school-wide “visiting colleges day”. We took tours, talked with professors, visited dorm rooms in the Intercultural Resource Center, and spoke at length with a Columbia student. It was a really great trip for them… especially in the 9th grade. They got to hear about how great college is and all the things they can take advantage of AND what they actually need to do in the next four years to get in.
The students I actually teach are 11th graders. It’s pretty depressing for me to think about most of their prospects for college, not to mention graduating. There is a small handful of them who might make it to schools that they want to go to and be set on a solid path from there (though I definitely will still be worried about how they are handling the workload. Most of these students are struggling with having just one AP class), but too many of my kids are so far behind on even the basic requirements that they need to graduate that its hard to say what’s going to happen to them. And this is at a school whose mission is COLLEGE. Getting into and success in college. For. Every. Student.
Its not that the 9th graders I took today are inherently more intelligent than the 11th graders I have now, but I can already see the difference in knowing all this information from the start. My advisory students have a clear goal, have seen the possibilities up close, and are willing to put in the work - even with those classes and teachers they claim to hate. I wasn’t at the school yet when my 11th graders were in 9th grade, so I don’t know what they did to put the seeds of these ideas in their heads, but I can tell you is that about 80% of the students in my class dont have those goals or the focus on the work they need to do to get there. After their 9th grade year, many MANY students did not pass all of their classes. Some passed none. Yet, as a first year school, the decision was made to ignore that (I guess? I dont know what the other reasoning would be if you were recognizing the problem head on) and move them ALL along to the 10th grade. Students who failed algebra, for example, were now taking geometry. Students who failed Global 1 went right along to Global 2. When these are classes that require building skills and understanding, that seems to me to set them up for another year of failure. Additionally, the consequences didn’t click with them at all. As a 15-year-old kid, it doesn’t seem to work to just tell kids that failing is going to hurt them unless there is something to follow that threat. They should have either been held back or immediately put into credit recovery classes on top of their schedules so they could make up the credits and see why classes in high school carry a bit more weight than in middle school. Instead, they went into 10th grade and many of them failed some more.
In New York, you have to have credits to graduate. I have kids sitting in 11th grade now with 2 out of 22 credits they should have received so far. In looking at their transcripts, maybe half of our 11th graders are on track. And that’s being generous assuming some of the others who are just missing a few credits will do some kind of credit recovery. Even though we don’t offer that during the year. Right.
This is one of the issues that drives crazy about my school. In some ways, its an issue facing a lot of new, small schools because everyone has to learn these systems for the first time in a very short amount of time and develop a school program to fit them. In the course of just making sure you have teachers and day-to-day classrooms, its easy to see how decisions get made to just keep it going. Its always survival mode. But shit is going to hit the fan at some point (like maybe when we have these kids as our first 12th grade class and they all think they are graduating and then wont be able to?) and I don’t see anyone trying to stop it.
So… here’s holding out hope for the 9th grade?
And what do we do with all of the kids whose lives our school might have accidentally yet completely ruined in the meantime?
Tags: /college readiness /graduation /optomism
