CSS admissions numbers confirm our rise to the top!

 
CSS admissions numbers confirm our rise to the top!
 
Columbia Secondary’s first few years of existence have been marked by extraordinary achievements at all levels. We have won 4 Blackboard awards for great teaching and administration. Our students standardized test outcomes are among the highest in the city, in both absolute and yearly progress terms. Our city report card was in the top 3%: indeed the highest 3rd score of all new middle schools and the highest 25th middle school of the entire city.  Higher scores than established middle schools, and higher than the city’s elite high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Bard Early College and Beacon. More importantly, we have successfully built what is arguably the richest middle school curriculum in the city, with one-in-the nation programs like philosophy, engineering , electives, creative arts and interdisciplinary J-term courses. These innovative curricula have received attention in the NY Times, Education Week, Daily News, and ABC News and be been represented in academic meetings, papers and books all over the nation. We have successfully raised over $250,000 in grants and parents-community donations.  Our parents are significant partners in teaching, planning and fundraising. Our partnership with Columbia University is strong and ripe for expansion as we grow into our Upper school and our students begin to take advantage of the University’s vast undergraduate offerings.
Our admissions numbers show we have already become one of the elite middle schools of our great city. For three years in a row we have received an average of over 750 applicants vying for the 96 sixth grade openings.  The academic quality of the incoming freshman applicant class has improved markedly – CSS now attracts the upper 7% of Upper Manhattans 5th graders, competing head to head with The Anderson School, The Computer School, and Delta for Manhattans top students. Moreover, the diversity of our incoming classes is among the highest of any highly selective science and math magnet school in the city, indeed of the nation.
 
And now our first high school admissions cycle also suggest we have positioned ourselves as a top option for the city’s most academically successful students. Our own student choices suggest a high degree of satisfaction: 91 of our 96 8th graders choose CSS as their top high school choice. For the only 15 or so open spots in its upper school, CSS has over 2000 applicants, including over 200 top 2% applicants, and over 100 private school applicants. Thus in our first year involved in the high school admissions process, and having invested very little in recruitment or marketing (we only went to one high school Open House), we will have an admit rate of less than 1%! As I joke with the Vice Provost of our partner Columbia University – by this measure CSS is already more selective than Columbia University, an Ivy League institution with more than 250 years in existence!
 
Kudos to Prof. Monica Marin and her team of parents and students, who have led this year’s high successful admissions efforts!
 
Of course, our success as a school is better measured by the depth of their knowledge and their intellectual qualities, by their character and moral fiber, by their happiness and fulfillment as human beings and actors in this adventure of life. … and most importantly, by how they chose to act in their lives to better their society and the world. We cannot yet foresee how the CSS experience will affect the unfolding lives of our children. We can, I think, be hopefully optimistic….
 
And it is encouraging, and sufficient cause for us to celebrate, that all normative indicators, including most recently, the admissions numbers, are pointing in extraordinary directions, and that the early years of this hard labor of love and extraordinary commitment by the faculty, staff, parents and students are indeed, in so many ways, paying off.  Join us, this coming February, for a schoolwide potluck celebratory dinner.
 
Congratulations to all for these early successes! We build CSS TOGETHER!
 
Dr. Maldonado