Council Member Moskowitz Warns Of ‘Monumental Civil Rights Crisis’
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Roughly half of all students who enter city high schools do not earn any kind of diploma in four years, and the news is even grimmer for Regents diploma rates — only 10% of black and Hispanic students earn the qualification compared to about one-third of white and Asian students.
In a City Council hearing yesterday, the chairwoman of the Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, called the numbers “shocking” and “appalling” and pressed the city to outline a plan to address the “monumental civil rights crisis.”
“An abysmally small number of kids actually graduate, and when they graduate they tend to graduate with an inferior diploma, especially if they are black and Latino,” she said.
The diploma has been called the “gold standard” by the state education commissioner, Richard Mills.
About 18% of city high school seniors earn a Regents diploma compared to about 57% statewide.
In 2004, about 49% of the city’s 23,541 black high school students graduated in four years and only 9.4% earned a Regents diploma. The numbers are roughly the same for Hispanic students, with 46% graduating and 9.8% earning a Regents diploma.
To earn a Regents diploma, students must achieve a grade of at least 65% on five state Regents exams: one in math, science, and English, and two in social studies.
Instead, the overwhelming majority of city students graduate with the less rigorous “local diploma” that requires them to score just 55% on those same tests.
State education officials started tightening up the requirements almost a decade ago and plan slowly to phase out the local diploma by 2012.
Students also can earn an advanced Regents diploma by passing eight exams.
A senior official at the Department of Education, Michele Cahill, who testified at the hearing, said the department was addressing the problem in part by dismantling large, factory-like schools and replacing them with smaller high schools. The city has opened 149 of these smaller schools since 2002. There are not yet any graduation data to analyze their success.
The city graduation rate is now at 54.3%, up slightly from 51% in 2001. Roughly 29.4% of students who graduated in 2004 stayed on for a fifth year and 16.3% dropped out during the first four years. About one-third of students entering high school flunked the ninth grade.
