“Startling” new data shows 89 percent of New Haven Public School graduates need to catch up in English and math before they can start earning credits at Connecticut public colleges and universities.
That data on remediation rates are set to be released soon, warned Alex Johnston, a New Haven school board member who sits on the gubernatorial P‑20 Council that collected the data.
“We need to brace ourselves,” said Johnston at a board meeting Monday night. “It’s going to be some startling data.”
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Johnston.
A Google search showed the data are already available for the city’s nine high schools, even though they haven’t been officially released. Follow the links for individual reports on: Wilbur Cross, New Haven Academy, James Hillhouse, Cooperative Arts & Humanities High, Sound School, Career, Hyde, Metropolitan Business Academy and High School in the Community.
Click here to read the full report.
Mayor John DeStefano said Tuesday that he welcomes the information, which was previously unavailable to the district. A key part of his school reform effort, he said, is to track not just how many graduates go to college, but how they do when they get there.
The new data provides a first-ever look at the performance of public school graduates across the state in higher education, according to Malia Sieve, program manager for the P‑20 Council. Sieve is the associate director of the CT Board of Regents for Higher Education.
She called the remediation rates across the state “fairly alarming.”
Statewide, 73 percent of Connecticut public high school graduates at state community colleges are recommended for “developmental” English or math classes, according to a “toolkit” the council put together. “Developmental” means “courses that carry no college credit and are designed to improve students’ basic skills so that they can be successful in courses that carry college credit.”
At Connecticut state universities, the remediation rate is slightly better: 66 percent of public school grads enroll in remedial or developmental English or math freshman year. In the state university system, “remedial” courses carry no college credit and are “designed to improve students’ basic skills.” “Developmental” courses “carry college credit only as elective courses; they do not count toward general education in any major and serve as prerequisites that students must complete prior to starting general education requirements in math or English,” according to the toolkit.
At New Haven’s local university, Southern Connecticut State University, the remediation rate was a whopping 92.8 percent.
At Gateway Community College, it was 85.6 percent.
Those figures are based on students who enrolled in state universities or college students immediately after graduating from public Connecticut high schools in the spring of 2010.
Remediation rates matter in part because they’re a predictor of success: “Students who need to take even one developmental course in college are less likely to earn a degree than their counterparts who do not need remediation,” according to P‑20’s report.
No high school in the state is exempt from the remediation problem, according to Sieve.
“There’s some proportion of every high school that is needing some remediation, but the need is greater in ‘higher-needs’ districts,” she said.
New Haven’s Report Card
Districts like New Haven, that is.
The reports, not yet officially released but available on a hidden part of the P‑20 website, show the vast majority of city kids arrive at college unprepared.
In New Haven, 89 percent of district grads needed remedial or developmental coursework in English or math their freshman year. That number concerns six high schools for which data was provided. (Data were withheld for three smaller high schools.)
The numbers cover students who enrolled in a state-run community college or university immediately following graduation from high school in Spring 2010. It doesn’t include students who went to the University of Connecticut, because that institution doesn’t consider any coursework to be “remedial.” It also excludes out-of-state universities and private institutions.
The reports give a first glimpse at how well city high schools are preparing kids for college.
For example, of the 329 students in the Wilbur Cross Class of 2010, 92 enrolled in a Connecticut college or university the following fall. Of those, 86 percent needed remediation or developmental courses in English or math.
At Hillhouse, where 58 students enrolled, the remediation rate was 95 percent.
Allan Appel File Photo
DeStefano talks to a student at the Davis Street School.
In an interview Tuesday, DeStefano said these new data are key to the school reform drive, which aims to produce graduates who go on to succeed in college and beyond.
One problem in measuring that objective, he said, is “there’s a real breakdown in academic data on the transition from high school to college.” The district has been focusing on finding out “whether kids are arriving at college ready to compete or not.”
Then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell set up the P‑20 Council in part to address that breakdown and to increase the flow of information between high schools and colleges, said Sieve. The council has been sharing the new data in a series of workshops between secondary and post-secondary institutions around the state.
DeStefano called the remediation rate “an important measure.” “It’s good to start measuring this information and figuring it in to our evaluation of the effectiveness of our schools.”
The measurement could add to the city’s toolbox as it goes about its new reform-minded quest of grading city schools, placing them into three tiers, and managing them according to performance. The scores for high schools are based mostly on standardized tests for sophomores, a graduation “trajectory”, and a “college success rate.”
Right now, New Haven measures college success with a rather “blunt” tool, the mayor conceded. The College Success Rate is defined as the percent of graduates who enroll in at least three semesters of education within two years of graduation.
The new data show not just who’s enrolled, but what kind of courses they’re taking. As the information becomes available, DeStefano said, “it’s got to be part of the evaluation and the tiering of the high schools,” he said. That way, he said, high schools can respond to the information and adjust accordingly.
Garth Harries, New Haven’s school reform czar, said district has been working “to the limits of our capacity and our ability” to study whether kids are on track to succeed in college.
College performance for urban K‑12 districts is “a sobering issue” nationally, he said.
“It is sobering, but it will be important for us to understand the high standards we need to be educating kids to so they can be successful after they leave us.”
The data will highlight the need for high academic standards not just for students bound for four-year college, but to “those kids who are doing career-focused associate’s programs,” he said. “While it may be easier to go to Gateway, it’s not necessarily easier for [students] to succeed there,” Harries noted.
“For kids to be successful in a career-focused associate’s program oftentimes takes a high level of academic ability. If they’re not prepared to start that career work without remediation, that puts their career training in jeopardy.”
College Success
P-20 Council
A chart tracks the flow of Hillhouse High students after graduation.
The governor’s council is also set to release another batch of data that will aide the city in that quest: How many high school graduates end up getting college degrees. P‑20’s high school reports study the performance of the high school Class of 2004 six years after graduation.
The reports show that many city graduates may enroll in higher education, but they struggle to finish out the degree.
At the city’s largest high school, Wilbur Cross, 331 students graduated in 2004. Only 18 percent received any “certificate” by Aug. 31, 2010, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. (A “certificate” is an undergraduate certificate, associates degree, or bachelor’s degree.) Another 35 percent of Cross grads enrolled in higher education at some point but did not complete a credential by 2010. And the remaining 46 percent did not enroll in higher education.
At Hillhouse, which had 194 grads, 15 percent completed a credential by 2010, 40 percent enrolled in higher education without completing a degree, and 45 percent did not enroll in higher ed.
Charts (like the one pictured) display the students’ paths after graduation. Check the links at the top of this story for the individual high school reports.
“I’m very welcoming of this information,” DeStefano said Tuesday.
Ultimately, he said, New Haven would like to go even further in tracking its graduates, both before and after high school.
“We would love to track [students] five years after college, in the workforce,” DeStefano said.
That would give a greater glimpse into the bigger picture: Whether New Haven Public Schools are preparing kids who land jobs, launch careers, and start on the path to becoming taxpayers.