NYKids finds positive outliers by identifying public schools with open enrollment policies that serve greater than typical percentages of ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and/or socioeconomically diverse youth, yet that consistently achieve unusually better student outcomes.
NYKids Advisory Board includes a number of leading educational organizations including CASDA.
NYKids’ new report entitled College and Career Readiness: Students’ Perspectives on Life After High School is now available on the NYKids website. This new and freely available report focuses on students’ voices from two of the positive outlier schools that participated in the first phase of the series of college and career readiness studies. These two schools, Malverne Senior High School and Crown Point Central School, qualify as positive outliers because they are “atypical” in the sense that they have achieved a trend of above-predicted graduation rates among different populations of students consistently over time.
In the first phase study, NYKids explored the perspectives and practices of leaders and educators, but in this second phase the research team interviewed students to get a better sense of their experiences as they prepare to transition from high school into college and the workforce.
What NYKids Found
As in the first phase study, NYKids discovered that Crown Point and Malverne were unique in the ways they approached preparing young people for life beyond high school. Differences in school context as well as student body size and composition and workforce characteristics helped to account for some differences that the research team discussed throughout the report. Despite important differences in urban and rural contexts, the NYKids team discovered four commonalities or “themes” that capture what Crown Point and Malverne students highlight as highest priority and most influential experiences in high school—they are:
Theme 1. Cultivating Student Agency
Theme 2. Contributing to a Caring Climate and Meeting High Expectations
Theme 3. Forging Harmonious and Supportive Relationships
Theme 4. Building Skills and Knowledge for Life after High School
