"I hated math. Math was like, the worst thing on the planet. I would be late. I would go to the bathroom and just sit there." Jahleah Santiago, 18, widens her eyes, outlined in cat's-eye makeup. Santiago grew up in Flushing, Queens, of Puerto Rican and Native American descent. She graduated from the Academy of Environmental Science in Manhattan and sent in just one college application, which brought her to this windowless fourth-floor classroom at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City. Both of her parents dropped out of high school; she is the third person in her family ever to go to college. And given her attitude toward math in high school—and the grades to show for it—the odds are stacked against her finishing.
In the Michael Bloomberg era of school reform, we hear a lot about rising educational standards. "When Dennis Walcott became chancellor, " Josh Thomases, a deputy chief academic officer in the city's Department of Education, tells the Voice, "one of his first acts was to say the correct bar was no longer a high school diploma, but career and college readiness."
Put another way, New York City officials openly admit that a high school diploma earned in our public schools today does not mean that a student is ready for college. In fact, 80 percent of New York public school graduates who enrolled in City University of New York community colleges last fall still needed high school level instruction—also known as remediation—in reading, writing, and especially math. Despite the department's proclamations, that percentage is up, not down, from 71 percent a few years ago. Algebra, which is a CUNY graduation requirement, is by far the most challenging for the city's public school grads: Just 14 percent pass the CUNY algebra placement exam.
With 272, 000 students and a $2.6 billion budget, CUNY is the fourth-largest public university system in the country. CUNY's four-year colleges don't accept students who need remediation, but its community colleges are required by charter to accept every New York City high school graduate who applies. Some 98, 000 students—most of them working class, 82 percent minorities—are in the community college system and 10, 000 more graduates of New York public schools enrolled in 2011 than in 2007. The city points to that growth along with rising high school graduation rates as evidence of its improved performance.
But something is clearly wrong when the high school graduate the education department holds up in the spring as a success story is, by the fall, an undergraduate unable to do college-level work. In an era of shrinking state funding, a flood of underprepared students is becoming a disastrous stress on the system. CUNY's community colleges have been forced to double their annual spending on remediation in just a decade, to $33 million. Faculty members have been transformed into de facto high school teachers.
