It is great that our course mastery rates are so high but I am worried that there is as much inflation at play here as we are currently experiencing at the gas pump. Grades do many things. They can encourage (or discourage), quantify, and communicate how a student is actually doing in a course to the student and the family. Of all of these things, I think that communication is the most important. It is essential that our progress reports provide parents with a picture of how much a student is really learning. It might be that we are doing just that, but the disparity between course grades and assessment scores seems to indicate otherwise. 

Currently, students need only three credits each in math and science to graduate; however, earning enough credits to graduate and being prepared for college-level work are two different things. We would expect that students going on to college have, at the very least, taken three Regents-level courses. 

We monitor the health of our CTE programs by measuring the percentage of each graduating cohort's students who take at least two courses in a department. 

We monitor the health of our fine arts programs by measuring the percentage of each graduating cohort's students who take at least two courses in a department.