Because my state requires AP certs to teach AP classes. It’s not that uncommon
socioeconomic status can be relative an I thought that the article was talking about relative status. For me to be relatively wealthier, someone else has to be relatively poorer, neh?
So are you basically saying the ladder doesn’t exist? That we can all be in the top 1%
Our poor live much better than the relatively wealthy of a few centuries ago. Doesn’t make them any less poor. We are almost all better off than the middle class of yesteryear despite the act that the poo are till with us.
I have two anecdotes that might fit into a pattern of whatever it is we’re talking about. One parent, white, calling the school about getting his daughter into more advanced classes. No can do, three is the limit. So he shows up in his business suit. Suddenly there’s no problem.
Another parent, black, wants to get her son into an honors program. Sorry, son doesn’t qualify because he wasn’t there last year (they moved). Later, “Professor D from Fancypants College” calls about getting her son into the honors program. Suddenly there’s no problem.
Different states, different times, and second-hand, so YMMV.
Well if that’s not a constraining factor then I don’t see why you don’t just have one AP class for the smart kids and one for the average kids, etc. Or do you think that you wouldn’t have to slow down your AP calculus class for the kid who barely made it through pre-calc?
Rather than having special after school tutoring sessions for the kid, why not have a separate class that goes at a slower pace that the kid can keep up with. We could call this class non-AP calculus.
It sounds like you are saying we have shitty teachers teaching the regular classes. Why do we keep the shitty teachers around if there is not shortage of AP level teachers? If anyone can teach AP then you could just turn all the regular calculus classes to AP calculus classes and everyone would be getting AP calculus.
Isn’t what makes it advanced the quality of the student? If you are going to try to teach Calculus to a bunch of kids who haven’t mastered Algebra you are just going to waste everyone’s time.
Since student’s are different then teachers need to move at a pace appropriate for the student’s ability levels. This means different classes for different ability levels. In order to separate ability levels that means gatekeepers.
If the problem is that some parents are going to lobby gatekeepers and others are not going to, the solution is to get the other parents to lobby the gatekeepers as well. If they are uninterested in doing so then that is not opportunity hoarding but opportunity shunning. Which is a different problem with different solutions.
A couple of things. The first anecdote sounds pretty bad but in what world does showing up in a suit make that sort of difference? How fucking spineless are these school administrators that clothing can cow them into breaking their own rules?
In the second example, I am assuming the professor also just moved to the area and the rule is being ignored for her kid. I would be similarly pissed if this happened at my kid’s school and it would be obvious to the whole world that the rules were bent for this student because they just moved to the neighborhood.
Or just use objective metrics so that you can’t bribe the referees.
Granted it was more than 20 years ago, but my AP classes in high school were gated. You had to take a test (multiple choice and essay questions) to qualify. That was to ensure that the student had enough of a base of knowledge going into the course to be able to follow along. If a student lacked that base, they would likely cause the problems listed above (would take the teacher’s attention away from the curriculum to teach what the curriculum assumes the student would already know, and the student is unlikely to succeed anyway).
AP stands for Advanced Placement, meaning that you were placed into that course. If a student could join at will the term has no meaning. I’m surprised that is the case now (though I suppose I shouldn’t be).
The courses I took back then were US History and Computer Science but it would have applied to any AP course.
First example, El Paso is a strange place. But it wasn’t just a suit, but a white guy in a suit, in a >95% hispanic zip code with a median income under $25k. We can’t tell if either actually made a difference from just one example. But we had our suspicions. It was the desired result, so we weren’t going to complain.
Turns out it was a stupid rule that was there because no student could possibly handle so many honors classes. But she took a full load and got an A in all of them. Yay EPISD. It’s easier to get people to break their own rules when they know they’re wrong.
I’m confused as to what the issue really is. That kids who meet requirements for AP classes are being left out for unfair reasons? Or that requirements for AP class admission should be lowered (or eliminated) to be more inclusive?
The negative perception of opportunity hoarding is strange. Why wouldn’t someone hoard opportunities with the idea that they’ll cash in on them?
Advanced placement into college, not into the class.
I agree inasmuch as I don’t think there is a natural law that states that education must be any particular way. And yet educational resources are not evenly distributed. We, the taxpayers, are frequently told that educating people more will result in less funding for other essential government services, like law enforcement. We are told that sacrificing arts and music and physical education will result in more funding for reading and mathematics instruction, even though these subjects are just as important for college admissions as the three Rs. People in rural and inner city schools are frequently told that there aren’t enough resources to provide a full roster of advanced courses for smart students in-house, so these students should either sacrifice their leisure time by attending classes outside of their district or at a community college, or they should sacrifice their aptitude by being bored with the available curricula. And because we, the taxpayers, are not the ones in charge, we accept what we are told like good little citizens. Education may not be a zero-sum game in theory, but if its practitioners behave as if it is, all the theory in the world doesn’t matter.
I mean, if education wasn’t a zero-sum game in practice, why limit gifted classes to the 95th percentile? Do we really think kids who test in the 94.4 percentile wouldn’t benefit from the same enrichment? No, we don’t really think that. But we have a mindset that resource allocation must be as parsimonious as possible. If you can only have 30 students in a classroom, and you’ve got 30 kids that test in the 95th percentile, then it doesn’t make good fiscal sense to hire another instructor just for the borderline cases–no matter how numerous they may be. No, they will be educated with genpop. So of course this is a situation of “zero-sum”. Student A gets a seat in the elite club that Student B is excluded from by virture of a tenth of a point. Which means that if that student should ever find themselves in an environment that is severely resource-limited (whether by design or not), they may be excluded from other opportunities. If this is not a zero-sum game, I don’t know what is.
I haven’t made up my mind about whether AP classes are inherently “opportunity hoarding”, but I defiinitely think opportunity hoarding is a thing. I saw it with my own eyes when I was in academia…not among the students but in the faculty. Professors serving on tenure committees coming up with criteria that they themselves had not been subjected to when they were coming up. I saw professors who had acquired million dollar grants and had been published in high-impact journals being denied tenure because the tenure committee didn’t think they were scholarly enough. To me, that is awful. However, I don’t think holding people to the same standards you were held to is necessarily wrong, provided those standards make sense as admissions criteria, those standards are not inaccessible to the vast majority of applicants through work ethic, and elite standards aren’t being treated as minimum requirements.
When I was in college, I never saw professors holding anyone’s hands. They took questions during lecture, but it wasn’t like they set their pace to the slow students’ pace. No, they expected the struggling students to either see them after class or go to one of the many tutorial sessions that were run by grad students.
So why should there be any hand-holding in an AP class? If students can’t keep up without holding up the lecture, then that’s on them (provided it is just a few students, of course). I only took three AP classes in high school, and all of my instructors let us know that it was sink or swim time, since they saw themselves more as facilitators than teachers. That’s the way it should be, IMHO.
Would it be doing a favor or a disservice to a C+ average student by admitting them to Harvard and telling them “it’s sink or swim”?
One, I think that’s relatively rare, and it’s certainly not mandated or required by College Board. if that’s what’s keeping kids from being able to take these courses, they should change the requirement.
Two, a 4-day, $500 workshop is not a tremendously heavy burden for a teacher to meet. It seems unlikely to me that this has a huge impact on supply.
Because that’s not what he wants to do. He wants to master college-level calculus. If you have enough kids interested in a non-AP calc course, by all means offer it, and maybe recommend that kid take it. But don’t limit his options.
The reasons for keeping shitty teachers around are legion, but I don’t think it’s directly connected to a shortage of AP teachers.
One, I think the vast majority of places that offer any calculus at all offer only AP. And so it’s AP calc or maybe AP Stats or nothing.
The course is proscribed. There is a test as the end. You teach as fast as you need to cover that material. You don’t slow the whole class down for those who need to catch up, but you also don’t speed the class up and go above and beyond expectations so that the ones at the top get more instruction at the cost of excluding the ones at the bottom. For kids that have skill gaps, you provide ways for them to fill those gaps.
Chunks of this are C&Ped from another post I made.
Open enrollment in AP has been an unambiguous success. For example, in 1999, when most programs had some sort of gate-keeping, 149,061 students took AP US History and the mean score was 3.02.
By 2016, most schools had adopted an open enrollment philosophy and started pushing more kids to take the test. This year, 489,291 students took the test, and the mean score was 2.7. While that does represent a drop, over 256,00 of those kids passed the test–150% of the kids who were even given access to take the course in 1999.
Open enrollment does involve changing how you teach–it involves working in more fundamental skills, spending more time teaching things you think you “shouldn’t have to teach”, adjusting instructional methods, and, yes, sometimes it means you have to change what a “C” looks like in your course, so that kids who took a risk don’t fail. But it’s preferable to kids not having access to the education they want because someone decided they weren’t capable: the data is pretty clear that a lot of those kids are perfectly capable.
Why? If, with hand-holding, a teacher can get a kid to a really deep, fundamental understanding of college level material, sparking a desire to learn, increasing his SAT scores and college options, and possibly saving him time and money in college–why on earth is that a bad thing?
Surely “gatekeeping” is a better description of this activity than is “opportunity hoarding”–the latter has weird overtones of ‘hanging onto’ opportunities, which makes little sense. The professors you describe weren’t keeping opportunities stacked up in a back room–what they were doing was keeping out potential competitors. They were guarding the gate and preventing challengers from entering.
As Darren Garrison said earlier in the thread, in reference to the metaphor:
It looks as though Swift’s ideas have not exactly met with universal acclaim. (Because they are nutty.)
Local possibly applicable anecdote.
In my county, one of the charter schools is a college prep school. This school has been maligned constantly for being “elitist”, and there is always a group of folks who are passionate about closing it. Nevertheless it has survived a couple of decades now.
Entry is by lottery of all who apply. I know four kids, three different sets of parents, who entered the lottery and got in. Probably pushed by their (ambitious, white) parents. They all dropped out and went back to their regular public schools (one ended up in a Catholic school) within a year. Why? Because they were not cut out to be college prep students, that’s why. They couldn’t or didn’t want to keep up. Some of them went on to community college, none ended up in a four year college or university.
I guess what I am saying here is that it appears that honors and AP classes and the like, at least in my county, are self-limiting. If there were more AP classes they wouldn’t necessarily fill up. It is a minority of students who will thrive in them.
AP is not “honors”. “Honors” is the top X%, students that the teachers have identified as being advanced, and therefore they think it is in their best interest to teach them more things faster. Say, teaching the honors math kids college algebra and pre-calc in the same semester rather than splitting it into two as done for the non-honors students. Or teaching algebra 1 and algebra 2 in one year rather than two. There’s an argument to be made that if you let too many in, it’s no longer an “honors”, but just a regular class with a “special snowflake” name to boost confidence.
But AP is about teaching college material, for college credits, to high school students who can handle the material, for the purposes of letting them skip their first semester of general education requirements in college and move on to their major earlier. That is a valuable service that saves kids and their families real money. And in that case, there should be no limiting. Any student who is academically ready to learn college-level material should be accepted. Even if all the students are academically ready for the course, then that should just mean that all the students at that school will be a semester or more ahead of their contemporaries when the go on to college. It’s based on what they actually know, not how they rate relative to their peers.
Do you think C+ students who graduate from Harvard wind up on Skid Row or something? I’m curious what you think happens to a typical C+ student who manages to gain entry into an elite institution. Something about them must be impressive, right? Either they have family connections, or they excel in non-academic endeavors. I’m not guessing they will lose opportunities by going to Harvard, that’s for damn sure. Unless they are footing the bill themselves and they do absolutely nothing the whole time they are there. Which is a shame, but only a shame on them–not their educators.