LI’s troubling high school graduation gap

It’s state budget time and again much of the battle is over school funding, and who will get how much. There’s only so much pie to cut, and value is rarely discussed.

The issue to taxpayers shouldn’t just be whether their schools get enough state funding, but whether the money is spent well. And as far as bang for the buck, the news is not good in challenged districts or traditionally successful ones.

The high school graduation rate on Long Island last year was 89 percent, but only 54 percent of students got scores on their Regents algebra and English exams that indicate college readiness. That gap underscores what’s wrong with our public education system. It hasn’t been rigorous enough, and we’ve often been fooled into believing that expensive schooling automatically means high quality.

That’s what we see when we compare our kids’ preparedness with that of students in other nations. And that’s what we’re seeing with new tests based on Common Core standards and the much-lower scores students are earning. The percentage of New York students who do well on the new state tests almost exactly matches the percentage of those who do well compared to international standards and the percentage who are college-ready. Statewide, about 40 percent of students meet the standard in each case.

Recently released 2014-15 high school statistics for Long Island show that the percentage of students who graduate with an advanced diploma closely matches the percentage of students who are ready for college. But the percentages of students who graduate without the “advanced” designation varies so wildly in its relation to college readiness across the Island’s 124 districts that graduating seems to indicate little about academic achievement..

In Roosevelt, the graduation rate in 2015 was 72 percent, but the college preparedness percentage was 3.3 percent. The numbers are abysmal in a lot of traditionally challenged districts. In Westbury, 75 percent graduated, but only 19 percent were college-ready. In Wyandanch 56 percent graduated, but only 6 percent were college-ready. In Central Islip, 79 percent graduated but only 20 percent were college-ready. But more shocking were the results in higher-income, “good” districts. Only 71 percent were college-ready in Massapequa, 50 percent in Seaford, 74 percent in Smithtown and 67 percent in Northport-East Northport, but the graduation rate in each was above 90 percent.

Their academic shortcomings often didn’t keep these students from enrolling in college: In each of the four “good” districts above, at least 90 percent did head off to college. According to administrators, about 70 percent of community college students and 50 percent of 4-year college students in the state, and their parents, paid for remedial college classes to retake classes graduates didn’t master in high school. And many took out student loans to do it.

Long Island school districts spend an average of $22,000 a year per student. That dedication to education as our highest value is what built this suburb — and its huge tax bills. But a shameful number of taxpayers aren’t getting good value. That’s the disconnect that threatens the future of this region and its children. That’s what we mean when we say the educational system needs to be fixed.