Metro

It’s quitting time for CUNY’s city HS grads

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Nearly one in three city public high-school graduates who enrolled in CUNY schools in 2007 and 2008 left before completing two years of study, data obtained by The Post shows.

For the class of 2009, nearly one in four graduates who enrolled in CUNY left by the end of the third semester.

The CUNY enrollment data from 2007 through 2010 — which also show remediation rates for city high-school grads climbing during that period, from 45 percent to 49 percent — come on the heels of the state’s new “college-ready” measure of graduates’ skill levels.

But while the “college-ready” measure is a sort of prediction for which kids will succeed in college, the CUNY data — which were supplied to every public high school this month — show how students actually fared.

“We want principals, who know which kids they’re sending to CUNY, to use the information with their staff to figure out how to better prepare the kids who are attending,” said city Department of Education Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky.

“It’s a tool to motivate and create a leverage point in the conversation about rigor in the classroom,” he added. “That’s the intent.”

A review of the data shows that even graduates from prestigious high schools can run into trouble in CUNY — including from the hypercompetitive Beacon School in Manhattan, which admits less than 6 percent of its 4,600 annual applicants.

In Beacon’s class of 2008, one-third of the kids who enrolled in CUNY needed remediation, and barely half of those who attended CUNY schools that year were still enrolled two years later. Beacon’s numbers have since improved.

As many as half of the CUNY enrollees from Staten Island’s well-regarded Petrides HS had to attend remedial courses.

Polakow-Suransky cautioned against drawing conclusions about schools’ effectiveness based on a small sample of their graduates.

A DOE spokesman added that the number of students leaving CUNY includes transfers, not just dropouts. But the data generally supported last week’s first-ever “college-ready” statistics showing that many high-performing schools graduate students who are underprepared for higher education.

“It does surprise me that a kid could have the advantage of that kind of education for four years and not be college and career ready,” said David Bloomfield, a CUNY education professor. “But, then again . . . graduation means nothing anymore in terms of college readiness.”

The principals at Beacon and Petrides did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Among the schools that have managed to bolster college preparation in recent years is the HS for Dual Language and Asian Studies in Manhattan.

The Chinatown school increased its graduation rate from 78 percent in 2007 to 94 percent last year, at the same time that it decreased remediation rates for its CUNY enrollees from 65 percent to 26 percent.

“We have been looking at the college piece from day one,” said founding principal Li Yan, who credited the longer school day, low teacher turnover and a college-level writing course for the improvements.

yoav.gonen@nypost.com