This certainly strikes me as extremely encouraging news: The NYC Department of Education today announced that record levels of city 10th and 11th graders took the PSAT in October. It ended up being 75% of students - a 44 percentage point jump from the previous year. Off the charts.

You may recall that the city DOE and the College Board announced a partnership last August in which city students would be able to take the exam free of charge. They also moved the test date from Saturday to a week day -- proving once again that there can always be better ways to do things, there just has to be the will.

Kudos to the city (and to the College Board) for pushing to increase access and make taking the PSAT's standard operating procedure for as many students as possible.

PS - Even more important, methinks, is the accompanying effort to offer more advanced courses to students who in the past wouldn't have had a chance to enroll because of lack of access, i.e. they can't take A.P. Chemistry because their high school doesn't offer A.P. Chemistry.

The route to college may not be for everyone, but eliminating the roadblocks that exist is crucial.

PPS - In terms of stats, these are the kinds of things that I think are important indicators of whether we are doing what we are supposed to be doing for our kids. Increases (or decreases) in test scores can be flukes, but significantly impacting the options we offer to the kids who show up every day has the potential to lead to something big.

UPDATE: Am I making too much of this? Perhaps. But this seems to me like solid evidence that the culture is (slowly) starting to shift...