"Overall, Queens schools are better than the city-wide average, but we still need to pull ourselves up," Terri Thomson, Queens representative to the central Board of Education, told the Queens Borough Board at the board's December meeting. Thomson, according to Borough President Claire Shulman, the first person to discover that funding for Queens schools was predicated on extremely unreliable sources and call for the situation to be rectified, told the board that high school graduation rates in Queens exceed the city-wide rate of 50.1 percent by 11.3 percent and that the dropout rate of 11.8 percent is lower by 5.7 percent than the city-wide 17.5 percent rate. Some 77 percent of Queens high school students meet English requirements for graduation and 85.8 percent meet mathematics requirements, compared to 70.7 and 80.8 percent, respectively, for the city as a whole. More...