I refuse to sacrifice acumen for parental delusions of grandeur. See? You choose your judgments and I choose mine. That doesn’t mean mine are wrong and yours are right, though with your black and white thinking your probably would say so.
All students are guaranteed equal education under the law. Separate but equal was tossed out with Plessy v. Ferguson. I’m sure you know that. I think I do help students achieve, and there’s nothing you can say to me on a message board, even in the Pit, that can convince me that I’m doing it wrong and should see it your way. I also think the “desire to learn” has been conflated here with “parents want the kid in honors.” The two are not always correlated; some kids want to learn even without parents forcing them to do so, even without parents who care.
None of you “parental choice” advocates have any recommendations on what to do when you can only recommend 2 kids for a seat in accelerated. Pick the kid whose parent is screaming for it, or pick the kid with indifferent parents who you think has more ability? I’d pick the achiever kid over the kid with the demanding parent, damn the consequences. School should be a meritocracy. You’ll never convince me otherwise.
It sends a message that you ONLY want kids in honors classes if they have parental support. Some of my best AP kids, and many adequate ones, had parents that didn’t care, didn’t understand the difference, or were actively against their kids being in advanced classes.
We do have a recommendation–that’s a fucked up situation that needs to be changed. There needs to be more slots. You may not be in a position to make that change and you may have to do they best you can in the situation you are in, but it doesn’t mean it’s the best of all possible worlds, or that it is a superior system to self-selection, which is what you claimed earlier when you said self-selection leads to “elitism”.
Cop-out answer. I had zero chance of changing that system any time in the remotely near term. Zero. I had my 2-3 recommendations and if my choice didn’t get good grades in the class that next year, I got shit for it. So I had to think very hard about who I picked and why.
Self-selection alone (which means parental selection-- I think the kids probably have a more accurate idea of their own abilities, but the parents decide they need to be in honors even if the kid doesn’t want to be) does lead to elitism. I think the selection process is a process, not solely determined by parental choice. If there are limited seats in the advanced classes, and face it, there generally are, you have to have seriously consider all factors when choosing a kid. What could possibly be wrong with choosing who gets the seat based on how well he did in my class and the year before? I don’t see the objection there. If parental involvement is the deciding factor in performance, as you all contend, then the kid with involved parents would probably do better in the class and would get the bump. If a kid is the best performer in my class even without parental help, then clearly he is a superstar and deserves the honors slot. But I don’t want the parents to get a less qualified kid into that precious slot when there is a stronger candidate without the whining, entitled mama. I can’t imagine how you’d justify doing it any other way.
And I’d love for you all to have had to deal with my department chair on this. She was brutal in her selection criteria and didn’t give a crap what the parents thought. She wanted only the best possible candidates for honors, and if your kid didn’t have the performance or the teacher rec to get it, fuck you, stay in the regular English class. That’s how it was kept down to 1 section per grade level, which was all the district would fund for our department. Knuckling under to parent ego was NOT HAPPENING.
I absolutely believe you had no choice in this. There are plenty of horrible things at my school I have no control or even influence over. But I don’t defend those policies. If you were the DC and it was totally under your control, would you keep it limited to 15-20 slots or would you open the program up? What do you think is best?
This is where we have a disconnect. I DON’T think there are generally limited slots. In my school, in my district, it’s by far the opposite–“grow the program, grow the program” is all we here. It’s been the trend for years–even College Board says that that
And surely those barriers include limited slots. Ever since US News and World report started linking it’s High School rating system directly to % of students taking (not passing) AP exams, the trend has accelerated.
Because in excluding the rich lazy kids you also exclude lots of other kids that could benefit from the advanced classes but who are not model students–stoners, behavior problems, learning disabilites, whatever.
Again, not saying that I think you had any choice. I am just saying that I think your district was wrong–horribly wrong–to limit those classes in such a way.
More teachers, more classes with fewer students per class. That’s what I think is best. I think we agree on this. If there were unlimited honors classes, then open them up to everyone. Unfortunately, the reality is, we never seem to have quite enough staff, so decisions must be made. I’d choose based on performance.
We do agree on that, then. And the trend is solidly away from limiting slots. Although I really don’t like a class under about 18, and I find 22 optimal–any smaller than that it’s a very different dynamic and I find it harder to get them to work productively together in groups or have enough perspectives for a heated discussion. Depends on the type of class, though.
If I was to verbalize said rant to you, it would have came out JUST like that…hot, heavy, and without a single pause during the entire rant. I was trying to show how emphatic I was because that incident still touches a nerve with me.
You tell me…your initial post projected the tone that parents vs. teachers is like a competition…
My bolding. Hey, when parents are subject to the “First 5” PSA’s commercials, such as this one (which pretty much describes the mindset that you abhor), what do you think some parents are gonna do? Mind you, this is a state-funded organization that is backed by teachers. I guess some teachers really don’t want to participate in such programs because they would need to gasp deal with some parents that would like to see their children challenged.
You’re right, because you broadbrushed all parents as royal PITAs, including those who accurately feel that their children need to be moved up and challenged…
…meaning that any parent that approaches your wife at the beginning of the school year is “largely a royal PITA”.
Curricula don’t teach, but teachers do…and each teacher is unique regardless of the curriculum. Also, schools in the same district are unique as well because of the uniqueness of the teachers that are in each school.
I have not one single problem with a parent looking out for their child whereas you maybe mistakingly assuming that this is attributed to the ego of the parent(s). Again, word travels about great teachers and suck-ass teachers as well, just like college students would discuss about good and bad professors…always been done in the past, will always happen in the future.
Now you get to the main ire of your wife. Parents that actually work their way up the chain of command which is actually a preferred way to request that their child be moved into an AP class. Maybe your wife should be more pissed off at the principal instead of the parent if she feels the child would be way in over their head.
Gee, if the school is printing a ton of these, then I guess they must be expecting many requests from parents…or they are not having an issue over such requests unlike your wife’s issues.
Requoted again because this is the current mindset that state advocates, and to blame the parents for this type of mindset is just plain flat-out ridiculous.
Apparently my post ("game over…they win’) was overly terse. The competition I abhor isn’t parents vs teachers, it’s student vs student. The parent “wins” only if his student achieves the long-term academic goal the parent has established in the 6th grade. Teachers are only a pawn in these parents’ game.
At each step of the move up the chain of command, the parent is seeking a second opinion, overriding the professional opinion of all those before…until they find someone who caves in. If 4 doctors tell you you have high blood pressure, do you think you’ve achieved something when you find a 5th who tells you you don’t?
To continue with the medical analogy: the situation I described is like a parent bringing their child, with perfectly normal straight teeth, to the orthodontist and demanding braces. Many of the subsequent posts are from people saying that their teeth are crooked and they wish they had had braces; many of the rest are from people indignant that the dental bureaucracy would interfere in what’s best for their child.
No, in my district, which could well be the one the OP was discussing, the general teacher level between the “great” high school and the others is not that different. In fact the high school my kids went to got the bulk of special money, because it is the oldest one and the one the top officials went to. The difference was purely kids and parents. The parents didn’t seem to grasp that test scores are the sum of the scores for each kid, and if a kid changed schools the scores went with them.
It might be a property value thing. When we moved here, one of the first things our relo adviser did was to pull out a list of the test scores for different towns and high schools. This came even before the earthquake maps. The parents protesting redistricting explicitly said that it was unfair because their property values might go down from being in another high school district.
Which state advocates this? The schools in question are private schools. California universities have a much simpler admissions procedure, even Berkeley.
Certain parents put an incredible amount of pressure on their kids. We had a scandal where a girl who was one of many valedictorians at our “good” high school later admitted she cheated for grades. Word had it that she wasn’t the only one. Care to blame the state for that one? I blame the pressure that if she wasn’t valedictorian, she was a failure.
I collected the registration forms for our GATE parent advocacy group, the purpose of which was to help parents work better with teachers and administrators. The forms from other high school catchment areas mostly had comments requesting talks on helping GATE kids be better adjusted, help with excessive homework, or ways of assuring that there was really differentiated instruction. The ones from this school area were all about doing enrichment for the kids.
I wonder how many of these overstressed kids melt down in college.
I know 4 teachers here in VA and all complain about parents. They think thier kids can do no wrong, and if the kids aren’t learning it’s the school’s fault. One teacher wouldn’t even go to the local laundramat because she ran into so many parents there, she drove 40 minutes instead.
There don’t seem to be as many older teachers now either, maybe partly because the teachers have to do so much recordkeeping on computers now.
A tangential rant-within-a-rant, on this subject: a first-grade teacher of my acquaintance informs me that (1) there is no time in the school calendar for field trips – it would take away valuable time from “teaching to the test” (thank you, NCLB); and (2) kindergarteners are no longer being taught how to use scissors–their day is spent on academics. So if any arts projects in the first grade require scissors, the cutting is done by parent volunteers.
Honestly, I think teachers want to balance what’s best for each individual kid with what’s best for the class as a whole. I do think it perverts the idea of acceleration if you can’t go faster because there are too many kids in the class who don’t get the material. Then you have to slow down, because you can’t move on until they do. Thus, it becomes regular ed instead of honors. What’s the point?
A lot of the exclusionary thinking here comes from the constraint of limited seats in the honors classes. That’s just the reality of the situation-- one section of 20 seats is all that you can have in honors. You have to pick the best 20 kids from the 100+ kids in that grade level. How can you do anything other than pick the top performers? Parental insistence CANNOT trump student performance. It’s like promoting the boss’ friend’s son over the most qualified applicant for a job. It’s bullshit. You’d hate it if you were on the receiving end of such prejudicial treatment at work, so imagine how bad it is to do to kid in school.
Yeah, it would be cool if the administration didn’t knuckle under to parent insistence in the face of all evidence that the kid doesn’t have what it takes.
Really, do you guys think a teacher would try to keep a kid out of an AP class just for shits and giggles, against parent wishes? Of course it’s easier to comply and just let the kid in. As a wise co-worker of mine says in these situations, “Do you really want to die on that hill?” If a teacher makes a stand that a kid doesn’t deserve the slot in honors, likely there is an excellent reason she’s making that stand. It’s not to spite your kid, be elitist, or impede his greatness. You’re attributing all kinds of malice and educational malpractice to what probably is a function of limited seating in the honors class, forcing teachers to make hard choices that offend the parents. Sucks for everyone, but in the end, the teacher probably has a more objective perception of the kid’s abilities in that content area, and also has a more global view of how to allocate the class space.
Now that everyone has refined their points, especially jsc, I’m inching closer to agreeing that there will always be a small group of parents that will try to ram their agenda down the throat of a teacher(s) that doesn’t warrant it…but not a majority of parents. I see the same thing happen when I coached hockey and now as I coach baseball, so I can identify with it on some level. I just hope that well-meaning parents who honestly and rationally think that their kid(s) need to be placed in an advanced class do not get stone-walled, but now I feel that isn’t the point being made now. When I read the OP, that was my first reaction, but it isn’t the case anymore.
I feel that teachers always make or break a school. Some communities (districts) have better salaries for teachers and can attract the cream of the crop, while others take any teacher they can get. I feel that most districts have their fair share of good and bad teachers while there are exceptions such as quite possibly the OP’s school district as having mostly good teachers, so maybe that is why we have differing viewpoints when it comes to parents, teachers and honor class placements. In our district, there is a wider gap in the performances of each school at every educational level in which the district is attempting to address. It has personally affected my middle son, but fortunately for the better this year. He has extremely strong math skills, but barely average language and writing skills. The middle school he goes to does address these types of students without ignoring the stronger skills they can be fully developed. Time will tell though.
My youngest son is actually going to a totally different school district in another town because by recommendation from the county, he would benefit greatly from the program in that district. He has speech and language processing issues, along with ADHD and Sensory Processing Disorder. Although our school district has a program, it is not advanced enough to address all of his learning issues. My wife has spent much time in researching the pros and cons of each district and feels that the other school program would help reach our son’s goals which is to attend regular public school classes by the 2nd grade. Time will tell as well here too.
THAT is my anecdotal evidence that describes my mindset.
Of course. But (a) when you work in an office, the loonies are the only ones you see; and (b) if I had strong survey-backed data, I wouldn’t have posted in the Pit.
