CUNY Master Plan 2012-2016

MISSION PART THREE
• Develop and expand high school, senior year interventions for students who do not demonstrate college
readiness on existing assessments, and increase opportunities for students to take “catch-up”
courses in high school, including those offered by College Now, At Home in College, and the Early
College schools;
• Develop more effective and consistent communication strategies regarding basic college readiness
factors, including CUNY’s skills proficiency benchmarks, and the consequences of not passing the
CUNY skills assessment tests;
• Enhance coordination and communication among the city’s education institutions, youth-serving
city agencies, community-based and nonprofit organizations, and local funders to align and
strengthen efforts to better support students and families;
• Pilot new collaborative structures through which high school and college faculty can work together
to improve college readiness;
• Develop data infrastructure and common metrics to hold all entities accountable to improving student
outcomes, and report progress toward goals to all constituencies;
• Use the CUNY/DOE data exchange to track the performance of high school graduates as they enter
college and as they progress through their programs;
• Increase opportunities for eligible students to begin earning college credit while in high school in
order to build momentum toward graduation.
To date, several discrete projects have emerged from this work, including the four described below.
The CUNY-DOE Curriculum Alignment Project
This project brings together faculty and curriculum development experts from CUNY and the DOE to
generate curricular units and performance-based assessments that are aligned across high school, remedial,
and college gateway courses in English and mathematics, and with the new national Common Core
State Standards. CUNY faculty will include representatives from community and senior colleges, and
from the departments of mathematics, developmental skills, and teacher education. Faculty teams,
through an intensive curriculum development process, will design units and assessments that can serve
as exemplars to be disseminated widely throughout CUNY and DOE. In fall 2012, faculty will field test
newly developed units and collect student work resulting from those units. In spring 2013, faculty teams
will evaluate student work samples and refine curricular units as needed. With this curricular unit
design as a foundation, the project will be brought to scale using course redesign through 2014 that aligns
standards across DOE and CUNY in targeted remedial, college gateway, and teacher education courses.
The CUNY-DOE Early Intervention Program
To begin to approach the readiness issue on a systemwide level, CUNY will launch a pilot in summer 2012
to identify and work with high school seniors in selected NYC public high schools who are on track to graduate
but who do not meet CUNY college readiness standards. The program will provide opportunities for
these students to develop college-level mathematics, reading, and writing skills by the time they graduate.
63