Our measure of college readiness reflects mastery of the New York State High School Curriculum.  It indicates the percentage of scores in a school at 85% or better across numerous state-wide Regent’s examinations, including English, Chemistry, Physics, US History, Global History, and the two highest-level Mathematics exams  Broad-based superior performance reflects that graduates are prepared for the rigors of higher education.

New York State reports Regent’s exam scores differently from middle school and grade school exams.  They do not report raw scores, just the percent of students in a school who scored within certain intervals (we have chosen the highest interval), so while our measure reflects overall subject mastery, the effects of different cut scores cannot be assessed.  

As with the earlier indicators, Long Island on average outperforms NYS in college readiness.  Through out the time period, LI has maintained an approximate 11 percentage point advantage over the state in the number of students scoring over 85% on the aforementioned Regent’s exams.  While the LI advantage is consistent, there has been a downward trend for both NY and LI over the five years.  In 2006, LI schools averaged a college readiness score of 39 which by 2010 had decreased to 35.  The state saw a slightly larger decline from 28 in 2006 to 22 in 2010.

The college readiness indicator can also be disaggregated by school poverty, and some of the patterns are similar to the earlier grades.  The steady decline in college readiness seems to be reserved to only middle poverty schools, who saw a six percentage point drop in five years.  While high poverty schools have remained nearly level, low poverty schools have begun to improve their college readiness score.  With high poverty schools remaining flat, middle poverty schools declining, and low poverty  schools improving, inequality in college readiness is increasing.  Well-to-do schools are doing better, leaving everyone else behind.

In summary, while Long Island’s schools are quite strong on average, there are sizable inequalities across schools based on the neighborhoods they serve.  Students in high poverty schools are disproportionately affected by the change in cut scores—more poor students become “failures” despite that they know just as much, if not more, about a topic than the cohorts that came just before them.  Similarly, the gap in Regent’s examination performance between privileged schools and everyone else has also widened.  And, as the demographic variables show, obstacles to learning are disproportionately concentrated in poor schools and among students of color.  Finally, the effects of the recent economic recession are apparent in many of our educational indicators.  If our goal is to provide a solid educational foundation for every child, then educational policies must grapple with these inequalities and design ways to ameliorate them.