"That brings me to one other subject about education, which is CUNY. The
performance at CUNY has really not materially
improved. We're still looking at a graduation rate after two years of 1.3
percent in the community colleges, an on-time
graduation rate of less than 8 percent in the four-year colleges. I mean
this is really sad. And the defensive, bureaucratic
protections of it are even sadder. The excitement for me of being Mayor of
New York City is seeing the improvements that
we make. The frustration is seeing the defense of failure and the
rationalizations and some of the silliest things I've ever
heard said to protect a system in which we have an 8 percent graduation
rate. That's a system, literally, if we were rational
people who really cared about kids being educated and people being
educated - that's a system we'd blow up. Right? With
that kind of graduation rate - if we had the guts to do it and we weren't
scared politically. And I find a tremendous amount of
frustration in making that happen.
So here's what we're going to try to do. First, I congratulate the Board on
making changes. They did change remediation for
the four-year colleges. They have now reiterated an attendance policy. And
they're working hard on doing a new writing test
so that we have basic levels of writing that the kids who are being educated
there can meet. But here are the additional things
that we should do.
We should definitely have a voucher program for remediation. A person who
wants remediation and needs it should be able
to choose any school they want so that we start to break out of the CUNY
monopoly on remediation. They shouldn't be the
only place that's doing remediation for lots of people. We should start to
challenge them with private schools, other schools,
that can maybe do a much better job than they can do. And then maybe they'll
turn around and they'll start to do a good job.
That can be done by giving vouchers to people who want remediation - so we
start to have a full system here and not an
enforced system. Let me give you one other thought. You know when you really
save a school system? This applies to public,
grammar school, high school, college. You save a school system when people
go to that school not because they're forced to
go there but because they want to go there. That's the way you save a school
system - when people want to go to a school,
when they say, "That's the school I want to go to." That school starts to
get overcrowded, everyone wants to go there. And
you know when you destroy a school system? When you force people to go to a
school that they otherwise would not go to.
You've got to let the standards rise to the level of what parents, children,
and students want - and you've got to have the
courage to do that. Or what are you serving? What are you serving? Politics,
special interest - who knows what? -- and that's
what CUNY's got to try to do. Have the courage to give out vouchers. Let
them go select NYU or St. John's or some
vocational school that's put together. If they want that more than they want
CUNY they're telling you something. Just like in
Milwaukee, if they want the private school or the parochial school more than
the public school, they're telling you something
and then you make that public school better than the private school or the
parochial school. And then you make CUNY better
than St. John's or NYU or Fordham. Boy, wouldn't that be exciting if we
could do it, and wouldn't we feel good about
ourselves if we could do that instead of constantly serving all this failure
and letting it play itself out year after year. So
we're going to push very hard for a voucher program at CUNY.
We're going to ask them to establish flagship schools in which a school
bids, raises its attendance standards, raises its
admissions standards, raises its performance standards, if it meets those it
gets more resources, so that schools start to be
held accountable. We're going to start looking at colleges where the
graduation rate is slipping below 1 percent=85 we have a
few. Maybe we should close them. Maybe if you can't graduate more than 1
percent of the kids in two years, maybe you
should close and we should try something different. We've got to do things
like that and a lot more.
We need minimum SAT scores. And I congratulate Queens College and President
Sessoms at Queens College for announcing
that there will be median scores of 1100 for admission to Queens College.
All of the colleges should do that. We just have to
press the agenda for reform as aggressively this year as we did last year.
So we won't stop and I hope you understand why
we are doing it. I also feel that what we are doing is completely
misrepresented and misconstrued as wanting to destroy
remedial education. It's really just the opposite. We want to make it work.
It wasn't working and nobody said anything about
it for 20 years. If you have a better idea that's very different from what
we're doing now to make it work, rather than just
reflexively defending the system. Well, fine you recommend that idea but not
the idea of CUNY having a monopoly on
remedial education, because it hasn't worked in 20 years. So let's see if we
can get together and really do something effective
with this system."
Geoffrey Akst
Mathematics Department
Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
(v) 212/346-8530
(f) 212/346-8550
(e) akst@idt.net
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