By Barbara Gref, Vice President for Education Research at Pattern for Progress

Special to the Times Herald-Record

The Times Herald-Record’s article of Sept. 5 is heartening: In three city school districts, graduation rates have gone up. This is good news for Monticello, Kingston and Port Jervis. The article also points to some good news statewide, from 2005 to 2014 the graduation rate rose from 66 percent to 76 percent. Laudable.

But there’s trouble here, too. In New York state, while 76 percent of students were given high school diplomas in June of 2014, only 38 percent of them were considered college and career ready. That is fewer than four in 10. The word “crisis” is overused, but it may well apply here.

In a report released on Aug. 31, Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress detailed the often chasm-like gap between high school graduation rates and the rate of college and career readiness. The report, “Diploma Disconnect,” examines these rates for all 109 school districts across the counties of the Hudson Valley – from Westchester to Sullivan to Columbia.

The Hudson Valley does a little better than the statewide rate – for 2014, the region’s college and career ready rate was 44 percent. Better, but still troubling. It still means the majority of were not prepared for the world beyond high school. The details sound an even louder alarm: The college and career readiness rate in Mount Vernon was 4 percent – yes, 4 percent. In Poughkeepsie it was 12. There are disquieting results elsewhere. In Fallsburg, the readiness rate was 17 percent; in Port Jervis it was 20; in Ellenville, 22.

Despite the rise in the statewide graduation rate, readiness rates have risen only one point, from 37 to 38 percent, over the five years of data released by the New York State Education Department. It’s a percentage that hits its lowest points in schools with the highest poverty, thereby giving the students in the poorest schools next to no chance to climb out of the circumstances of their considerable disadvantage.

The college and career readiness rate is not a complex and unintelligible formula. It is simply the rate of students who graduate with a 75 or better on the English Regents exam and 80 or better on a Math Regents exam. When students score below these thresholds, it is likely they will need remediation in college – often incurring debt to get the skills they should have gotten in high school. And, these students are already on a track to not complete college, a phenomenon documented in the Times Herald-Record of Aug. 31 and Sept. 3. In addition, students who have graduated high school unprepared and who are not heading off to a four-year or two-year college also are unlikely to succeed in the workplace. To be sure, we hear again and again the lament of local employers as they seek qualified workers and cannot find them.

At Pattern for Progress, we began to read about these rates while seeking a measurement of what the public is getting for the $63 billion it spends annually on public education in the state of New York. That figure, the highest single expenditure in the state budget, translates to $21,118 per pupil per year. It is the highest in the nation. And here, in the Hudson Valley, as is painfully obvious in the school tax bills that arrived this month, we pay some of the highest property tax rates in the state and the nation.

So while we can take a moment to feel good about rising graduation rates, we must look more deeply at what we are doing to prepare our students for the world outside the schoolhouse doors.

We need to ask this: What does that piece of paper we hand students each June really mean? If it means something different in the well-to-do district of Monroe-Woodbury than it does in much-poorer Monticello, then that is unacceptable. And when we see plainly that, across the state of New York and across the Hudson Valley, fewer than half the students are prepared for college or career, then we need a plan – and we need it yesterday – to address the grave disservice we are doing our students at the cost of $63 billion a year.

Barbara Gref is vice president for education research at Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a regional research and policy organization located in Newburgh and celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding this year. The referenced report is part of the report library at pattern-for-progress