Giving Compass' Take:

• Almost 60 percent of  New York students who graduated last year continued their education, and the state also saw an increase in college readiness. 

• How has education technology played a role in college preparedness and graduation rates?

• Read about college and career readiness under ESSA.

Nearly 60 percent of New York City students who graduated high school last year continued their education after they left, continuing an upward trend, according to a trove of new performance data released Monday by the education department.

Officials also touted a boost in college readiness — a metric that measures whether students would have to take remedial classes at CUNY — though roughly half of students still do not reach that bar. Fifty-one percent of students were considered college ready, an increase of three percentage points compared with the previous year.

Those college readiness statistics are included on the city’s school-quality reports, which were also posted online Monday. Schools receive a quality “snapshot” and “guide” — each with varying levels of detail — that include results from surveys and school observations alongside graduation rates, test scores, and demographic data.

The education department acknowledged that some of those gains came from CUNY changing its standards for what counts as “college ready,” including removing a requirement that students take advanced math in high school. City officials said there still would have been a two percentage point jump regardless of the new standards.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the education department scrapped the A-F letter grades that were once assigned to schools during the Bloomberg administration, and which were criticized for focusing too heavily on progress on state tests and other metrics.

Instead, former Chancellor Carmen Fariña developed a new “Framework for Great Schools” that includes measures of trust, collaboration between educators, and quality of instruction in addition to student performance. The current reports continue to reflect Fariña’s philosophy of cooperation as a driver of school change instead of competition and consequences. The quality reports released on Monday include much of the same data as those under Bloomberg, but they do not feature an overall school rating.

Read the full article about the record number of NY students going to college by Alex Zimmerman at Chalkbeat