<p>Set college or vocational school aside for a moment…</p>
<p>HOW DOES A SCHOOL SYSTEM PUT A KID THROUGH 12 YEARS OF SCHOOL WITHOUT LEARNING TO READ?! 80%?!</p>
<p>^ I used to ask the same question, Cromette. And then my children attended the local rural middle school. In DD’s 8th grade Language Arts class, nearly half were reading at a 4th grade level. This information is directly from the teacher.</p>
<p>Of this year’s 7th grade class, 50% did not meet the reading standards in 6th grade. 60% did not meet the math standard. Yet, they are all in middle school.</p>
<p>There may be 80% of NYC high school grads who cannot function properly at a college level but can they otherwise read?</p>
<p>“HOW DOES A SCHOOL SYSTEM PUT A KID THROUGH 12 YEARS OF SCHOOL WITHOUT LEARNING TO READ?! 80%?!”</p>
<p>To me, it is miracle that they do. But they live in a literate culture, and with some books and plenty of good conversation at home, they succeed, despite being confined to the dayjails.</p>
<p>^ You crack me up, Mini. That’s what Spyguy and I call his middle school.</p>
<p>What I find frightening about these stats is that it’s not the literacy per se that’s in question, but most likely their ability to comprehend the material. Like reading a voter’s pamphlet. S-c-a-r-y.</p>
<p>Most NYC CC students are students who couldn’t get into one of the CUNY schools. In many states, there are a few big public Us which are located away from the major population centers and so only a small percentage of kids can attend 4 year colleges and live at home. It’s even harder for people who work full time to attend a 4 year college part time. </p>
<p>In NYC, each and every one of the boroughs has at least one CUNY four year college. See [Colleges</a> & Schools - About - CUNY](<a href=“http://www.cuny.edu/about/colleges.html]Colleges”>http://www.cuny.edu/about/colleges.html) Additionally, there are private colleges and many working people attend them part time, e.g., Marymount Manhattan, Pace, St. Francis College. </p>
<p>I audited a course at a CC last summer. Roughly half the students were straight from high school or had attended high school for a couple of years and then gotten a GED. Most of them were terrible students. A couple of them had really matured during CC and were going on to 4 year colleges. The rest cut a lot of classes, didn’t focus during class, and were often only attending CC to play a sport–they wanted to be recruited by 4 year colleges but either didn’t play well enough in high school or didn’t meet the NCAA standards --or because their parents insisted. The other half were immigrants with an average age of about 40. The majority were native Spanish speakers. They were AMAZING people. Yes, some of them had to take remedial classes; they hadn’t been in a classroom since they left school in their native country at an age of 14-16. Their work ethic was unreal. </p>
<p>I think the presence of so many public 4 year colleges in NYC makes our CCs quite a different than CCs elsewhere. I’d also guess that there are only a couple of places in the US which have as many immigrant students, especially undocumented ones.</p>
<p>Students don’t graduate from public high school in NYC without knowing how to read (unless there is fraud in their high school, and there is some but not much). The headline is just wrong. There is a huge difference between knowing how to read and knowing how to read well enough to handle college-level work.</p>
<p>NYC has a million students in its public school system. There is a huge range of abilities and motivation among the students and a very large variation of quality in the schools. There are some terrible high schools in NYC, no doubt, but some really excellent ones as well that do a great job educating students (despite class size of up to 34 students–most of my daughter’s classes have had 30-34 students). </p>
<p>The lack of uniform quality is a big problem, but the city has kids at every conceivable income level, and something like 25 percent of NYC public school students were not born in the U.S. There’s a whole category of high school for students who immigrated less than 3 years before high school age, but not nearly enough seats in these schools for students in that category.</p>
<p>Another factor is that more students are graduating from high school in NYC. Here are the stats if anyone is interested. </p>
<p>[Mayor</a> Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott Announce that Record Number of Students Graduated from High School in 2011 - 2011-2012 - New York City Department of Education](<a href=“http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/mediarelations/NewsandSpeeches/2011-2012/Grad_Rates_20120611.htm]Mayor”>http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/mediarelations/NewsandSpeeches/2011-2012/Grad_Rates_20120611.htm)</p>
<p>The headline is misleading, but fraud is rampant. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if 80% of freshmen at CUNYs actually are illiterate in the academic sense. My daughter teaches a group of kids who are on their last chance to pass the regents exams for graduation. They are wonderful kids who want to be there, but it is tough. She was observed yesterday and the one thing she was told was that she didn’t take time to specifically empower the female students. She was so annoyed because her students are mostly over age and it is now March. The kids need to be empowered with a diploma, not coddling.</p>
<p>I teach literacy as a volunteer to immigrants. There is a very hardworking, eager to learn group, but there is also a group with no history of literacy in any language. They are very tough to teach. There is also a group of native born Americans whose only language is English for whom true literacy is an unfamiliar concept. They are also very difficult to teach.</p>
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<p>zoosermom, there is a very, very big difference between illiterate in the academic sense (by which I mean prepared for college-level work) and actually illiterate, e.g., unable to fill out an application for a learner’s permit and take the multiple-choice test, or read the NY Post or Daily News.</p>
<p>CUNY has 271,000 students seeking degrees at 11 4-year colleges and 7 community colleges. There’s a very selective honors college in each of the 4-year colleges, while the community colleges have open enrollment to everyone who has a high school diploma or equivalency diploma.</p>
<p>As for the comment about tax money going toward remedial work, if students use up their financial aid doing remedial work, it’s gone. If they haven’t managed to learn enough to do college work when they are in high school, isn’t it better for society and the economy for them to be more literate even if they never manage to get a degree?</p>
<p>Oldmom, I understand the difference, which is why I used the specific phrase that I did. As I mentioned in the post, I am a teacher of literacy. Also, I have a husband who is illiterate in the, well, literal sense. </p>
<p>The question is what to do and that is not as easy as it sounds. Some students, like my daughter’s, aren’t going to college, but really do need a high school diploma if there is any hope for a decent life. But just getting the paper isn’t enough for people who are going to college. There are many different needs that have to be met, and one size doesn’t fit all despite the best of intentions.</p>
<p>zoosermom, it goes without saying (but I want to say it!) that you are doing good work, and your daughter too!</p>
<p>Thank you! You would be amazed at how many people don’t think either my daughter’s students or mine are worth the trouble. But they really are! One of my daughter’s students got accepted to a four year college. Very exciting. I think the young lady has good family support. I really hope so.</p>
<p>Considering the level of the average college in this country, the bar of doing work at the college level is not that high. Why is it surprising that a high number of students cannot do this after their K-12 when they probably will obtain a college degree with the SAME basic skillsets. </p>
<p>Take a look at the SAT and ACT verbal sections or take the test with the objective of scoring at the 50 percent percentile. All you need is a 7th grade education. If it was not for the necessary inclusion of easy vocabulary questions, the average would dip much lower, especially if placing more focus on the reading comprehension.</p>
<p>Simply stated, our schools graduate a very high percentage of kids who have not been TAUGHT properly how to read, write, count, or reason at anything that come close to a college level. </p>
<p>But that seems to fit a nation of apologists to a tee. We were a nation at risk 25 years ago, and it has gotten a lot worse. As the famous report stated at that time … The longer our kids stay in school, the dumber they get. </p>
<p>We simply prefer to look the other way, and wrap ourselves in the blanket of fame woven by our private tertiary education. Yes, we do have the Ivy League and MIT and Stanford, but we also have a nation of people barely above the level of literacy. </p>
<p>And for that you can thank our “decision” to abdicate our education system to the ones who will do the least for the largest pay with the tacit approval of the corrupted leadership. </p>
<p>But we will continue to lead the world in self-esteem.</p>
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<p>The actual waste is that money for public education is spent in K-12, then spent again in public colleges and universities teaching remedial (in a college context) material that the students should have learned in K-12.</p>
<p>Or, for those who do not go to college, the waste is that their reading/math/etc. skills are worse than they should be, resulting in lower lifetime opportunities and productivity (both economic and non-economic, and both internal and external).</p>
<p>The 80% is regarding those who end up at one of NYC’s Ccolleges. This figure doesn’t actually surprise me for two reasons. </p>
<p>One, there are many NYC public high schools which are run more like overgrown day-cares or even prisons because of a combination of ineffective teachers/admins and a critical mass of violently disruptive students who control the classroom to such an extent even the most dedicated teacher would be hard-pressed to teach those who do want to learn something. If the environment isn’t conducive to conducting class due to fighting/threats by the violently disruptive, there’s not much even the most dedicated best trained teacher can do. It also doesn’t help that most of the teacher/admin are directed at the “problem children” like the violently disruptive at the expense of everyone else…especially the above-average academic achievers. Heck, I’ve heard and even had a taste of having some teachers/admins regard the latter kids as “distractions” from their seeming goal of making everyone “equal”…even if it is at the expense of kids who should be allowed to accelerate academically. </p>
<p>Secondly, is the factor that before the complete ending of open admission in the CUNY 4-year colleges, remedial students used to be spread out over the 4 year colleges along with the Ccolleges. When they ended that, anyone who needed remedial coursework ended up being concentrated in the Ccolleges. While this had a positive effect of rehabilitating the CUNY 4-year colleges which had become stigmatized from the '70s till the late '90s because of Open admission and the flooding of so many remedial students there which prompted even pre-'69 CUNY alums to discourage their academically above-average kids from applying, it also concentrated all the remedial students into the system’s Ccolleges. Hence, this misleading headline and story.</p>
<p>I’m a senior in NYC.</p>
<p>Observations:
-I’ve taken 200 and 300 level classes at the local CUNY (in political science) and some of the students in them have been embarrassingly stupid.
-Today I read a 9th grader’s English essay and counted over 40 mistakes (two pages, double spaced), including, of course, there/their/they’re, etc. I asked my teacher why people can’t spell and he said that we don’t really teach spelling/grammar anymore.
-When teachers call on the kids who don’t volunteer to read, we end up spending five minutes on a four sentence passage.</p>
<p>emeraldkity4, I agree that reaching college competency in English and math should be prerequisites for almost every course (not just for receiving the degree). It’s ridiculous that it’s not; it only sets the students up for failure.</p>
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<p>I’m not talking about financial aid. I’m talking about the straight subsidy for community colleges by the states, and the subsidy from the federal government via tax credits and deductions.</p>
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<p>It’s an opportunity cost. If they are taking a seat in a course that they aren’t qualified for, they may be denying that seat to a qualified student. I guess that I’m somewhat glad that the tax credit is limited to four years but the subsidies for community colleges aren’t.</p>
<p>What I thought was interesting was that the community colleges used accuplacer or what ever computer test( which was why my D had a problem, because you couldnt go back and check your work- she qualified to have accomodations i.e. a paper & pencil test, but she didnt want to hassle with it.), but 4yr schools with presumably higher bar for admission used high school transcripts & SAT scores for placement.</p>
<p>I also used to be a college counselor at the community college& I had advised several students who had graduated with very good grades, but they couldnt test into English/math. ( usually just math) I think some of it was the test, because my daughter wasnt the only one who had been admitted into a rigorous school, but didnt qualify for college algebra.</p>
<p>My youngests university however, has their own placement test, but she let two years go by since she had taken math (she took a gap year) before she attempted the placement test & that is a long time, for anyone.</p>