Each year, the education department releases what’s called a school quality snapshot for every one of the roughly 1,800 schools in the city — filled with data on everything from academic performance to safety statistics.
For high schools, one of those measures is college and career readiness.
“What gets measured, gets done. And what this new [college and career readiness] measure does is to give information about the schools that are doing a really good job of preparing our students to succeed in college and in career,” First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said.
The city has long included data on this subject. But starting in this year’s reports, educators are using new data streams and creating an average on a scale of one to 100 — something that Weisberg says can be used by parents and students as they’re trying to select a high school.
“What our team did is dug into the records of 90,000+ of our graduates to see what really predicted, again, not just where they’d go to college — most of our kids enroll in college and most of those kids enroll in CUNY — but whether they get the degree, and that’s the critical measure,” Weisberg said.
That includes students’ grade point averages, whether they’ve taken advanced placement or international baccalaureate courses, and whether they’ve earned career and technical education certifications.
At Bushwick Leaders High School in Brooklyn, students can enroll in the city’s first data science career and technical education program.
“It’s a really great skill to be able to manage large data sets and kind of make meaning from this huge amount of data that we often come across in our different careers,” principal Enrique Garcia said.
Garcia says having that reflected in the career and college readiness score makes sense.
“I think it’s done a really great job of looking at what are the predictors of success in college and beyond, and helping schools focus on those things that we know predict students’ success when they’re in college,” he said.
Garcia says having that reflected in the career and college readiness score makes sense.
“I think it’s done a really great job of looking at what are the predictors of success in college and beyond and helping schools focus on those things that we know predict students success when they’re in college,” he said.
