Just wanted to add onto the idea of a whole schools curriculum being harder instead of just some classes, a friend has her son at an elite private school and comparing his schoolwork to the neighbor kids who go to public schools, he said his regular classwork is about equivalent to a public school honors course.
If you are adopting monstro’s sink or swim philosophy to AP classes, then maybe but if you are going to ask the teacher to hold a student’s hand while they try to figure out how to calculate the area under a curve at the expense of who grokked it the first time it was explained to them, then limiting his options might be necessary to expanding everyone else’s, neh?
So you think those shitty teachers would be better off teaching AP calculus? I don’t really understand your point. You complain that all the regular classes are taught by shitty teachers so we should make more AP classes as if this will get rid of the shitty teachers.
Oh, in that case what are the shitty calculus teachers doing?
Maybe we should be talking about English, where the shitty English teachers teach regular English while the good ones teach AP English. Why not turn ALL the English classes to AP English?
Are you just against tracking generally?
Why hold back the brighter kids? Why not just have a separate class for them (call it honors AP if you want)? Is there really no way to know which kids are going to be at the bottom so that you don’t have to twist and turn to keep them up to speed in a class where they will struggle to get up to speed and you have to goose the grading curve so you don’t flunk them?
Because, a teacher’s time and attention is a scarce resource. With hand holding, a teacher can get an AP/honors kid to an even deeper, more fundamental understanding of college level material, sparking a desire to learn (rather than be bored watching your teacher hold the slower kids’ hands for most of the day), increasing his SAT score (so that he might be able to go to Harvard instead of NYU). THAT’S why its a bad thing.
If resources were unlimited, I would want my kid to be individually tutored by Phds for the whole school day. But resources are limited and my kid is bunched in with other kids. They try to separate them out by proficiency in different subjects, so he is learning math with much older kids, reading with kids one grade higher and French with kids his age. Before they did this, he was bored to death of math and he hated it, it was like brushing his teeth, boring and monotonous.
I don’t think Mandy Jo is proposing to require that kids be academically ready, just have the desire.
It seems like we are talking about something else now.
It sounds like you are saying that because Trump’s son-in-law was able to buy his way into Harvard, that we shouldn’t be criticizing letting C+ students into Harvard on a sink or swim basis.
Hunh, I just realized that you guys are talking about honors classes as if they wre easier than AP classes. This was not the case at my high school, honors classes were tougher than AP.
I’m not sure I follow that logic: how does having a “weed out” course when you are younger and less prepared to handle it make you more likely to be successful in a “weed out” course in college? The kids that could handle “sink or swim” in high school will likely be able to handle it in college, and their are kids that “sink” in high school that then never develop the academic skills or the soft skills they need to have any chance of success in college. But some of those kids that weren’t ready for “sink or swim” at 15 might have been ready to handle it at 18, had they had a chance to learn the fundamental academic skills at an earlier date.
The only people helped by a rough, no-mercy style class in high school are those that have a support network (e.g., parents) that uses the course as a learning opportunity to teach a kid how to handle that sort of course–it’s that experience, along with acquirement of fundamental academic skills, that made college a joke. Capable, hard-working kids who lack that sort of support do not learn from those courses, they get side-lined, permanently, and end up living in poverty when they could have gone to college.
Finally, “weed-out” courses are literally tougher for those kids. Teachers are less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, more likely to interpret things as evidence that they don’t belong, less likely to try to talk them out of dropping when they start to struggle. The privileged kids think they are handling it all on their own, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make the class a challenge they can manage. Children who lack “parents of agency” or just the benefit of the doubt that middle-class and affluent white kids get are facing a very different course.
One, the existence of a 3-tier system is far from universal: in my (large, urban) district we have regular and AP/pre-AP. I don’t think that is that unusual. So in many, many places, being kept out of AP is being kept out of college prep work. Two, I’m fine with the idea of having better non-AP courses (and better regular courses). That would be awesome. And if that means fewer kids opted for the most advanced option, that’s fine too. But no matter how solid those courses are, I’m never going to be okay with telling a kid “No, you can’t take that class.” I’m fine with recommending he doesn’t, but that’s not the same as forbidding him to try. And once you take a kid, I think you have to support him: that doesn’t mean just passing him along, but it does mean giving him the opportunity to remediate missing skills, and not putting arbitrary impossible requirements on him.
Finally, if you had good, solid “honors” classes, people would be even more enthusiastic about pushing minority and poor (and especially poor, minority) kids out of those, too.
And I can’t believe that you seem to be okay with that. It’s true that parents love a “weed out” course if it makes them feel better about their kid (because, again, if their kid gets mono or attempts suicide or develops an eating disorder, the system will work with them) but parents can be taught to love other kinds of classes and teachers, too. And honestly, as long as a fantastic education is still available to their kids, it’s only the virulent racists who will leave. It’s not about “dumbing down”. You don’t have to “dumb down” anything. I’ve shown the numbers–increasing enrollment has had a mild effect on the mean score for tests, but led to hundreds of thousands more kids being successful on the exam. More kids being successful than were even allowed to take the course.
In that case, why leave out the exam? Why keep the number of spots limited? Why tell a kid he’s not good enough to even try? I can’t think of a single reason except “White parents need an artificial way to make sure that there are white-majority classes for their kids to feel safe, and also superior.”
**Lemur **is right. In the highly selective schools, the support you get is insane. Get a hair up your butt and run to NM to herd goats for a year? They will take you back and give you seminar credit. If a kid starts failing classes, the red flag gets tripped in the first couple weeks, and you’ll find yourself with a tutor, a psychologist, and a nutritionist. It’s a totally different world. This is why “undermatching” is a bigger problem than over-matching. The kid who is well-qualified for the regional state school gets no support when things go pear shaped, and when he wanders off, no one knows. Put that same kid at a selective institution with a 100% needs met policy, and he will graduate, no matter what life throws at him.
To change the subject slightly, in my experience, the issue is more “opportunity leveraging” than “opportunity hoarding”. Having an early opportunity gives you a solid place to stand to leverage later opportunities to their utmost. This can make it really difficult to offer opportunities designed to help kids catch up, because whatever the offer is, the kids who need it least are best prepared to take advantage of it.
For example, if you have a cluster of students who are struggling in your class, it can be tempting to offer an extra credit assignment so that those kids can “catch up”. But if you do, it’s always the kids at the top of the class that blow the assignment away–that’s why they are at the top. And the kids at the bottom, whatever was holding them back to begin with is still an issue, so they don’t do it, or they do crap work, and the gap between the top and the bottom–the gap you sought to close–gets worse.
Here’s a more practical example. College Board has spent a ton to offer high-quality free SAT prep courses on line through Khan Academy. The goal is to erase the advantage of expensive prep courses only available to relatively affluent kids. It sounds like a great way to level the playing field, but the sort of parent that pays for kids to take expensive prep is also the sort of parent to force kids to use the free stuff in addition to the paid courses, and children with some sort of clue are more able to teach themselves on-line and get the most out of what is offered. Some poor kids will make good use of the prep, to be sure, but I’m not convinced that in terms of sheer numbers, it won’t make the gap wider in the end.
Because not all kids want to take AP classes. And that’s fine–but those who want to should have the option.
I am against it being mandated. I think kids, especially in high school, should be able to opt into advanced classes provided they’ve had the prerequiite course. And they should be supported when they get there.
If you have enough kids to make such a class, go for it–but don’t limit who can be in it. Advise, recommend, don’t “goose the grading curve”, but let them in. And while you shouldn’t “goose the grading curve”, you also shouldn’t make it deliberately difficult at first just to run those kids off.
And if there’s not enough kids for both classes, I’d teach an AP class that follows the AP curriculum and gives every kid the chance to earn a 5. I wouldn’t worry about including advanced topics that weren’t on the test.
An AP course has a set curriculum. Your job is to teach that curriculum. Not giving some kids access to that curriculum at all so that you can take some other kids even further seems insane to me. And good teaching doesn’t leave some kids bored while others get their hands held. There are a multitude of ways to fold in enrichment and remediation throughout the course.
If kids in the 94.4 percentile would benefit why not those in the 93.4? If those in the 93.4 percentile would benefit why not those in the 92.4?
Anyway you make the distinction is somewhat arbitrary. However, if you draw the line too low then the class ceases to be advanced.
Because a “weed out” class in high school is still different from a college “weed out”. If you get weeded out of a high school class, it doesn’t cost you or anyone else money. You don’t have to stay in college another semester. Being weeded out of a class along with your BFFs from kindegarten is a different kind of experience than being weeded out of a 101 course as one of the few minority kids in the program, where no one gives a flying fuck about how charming you are and how rough your homelife is.
I remember struggling in that AP US history class and having second thoughts about whether I belonged in it. I wasn’t teh gifted. I didn’t come from an upper middle class family. My parents didn’t particular care if I opted for honors, because neither had ever heard of AP. However, I rose to Mr. B’s challenge and worked my ass off in that class so that I wouldn’t fulfill the low expectations he probably had for me. If I hadn’t been able to do that, the worse that would have happened is that me–along with a whole bunch of other kids–would have found our way back to the honors class.
I don’t see why schools can’t provide an honors class for the smart but non-competitive types. Now that I understand that your school doesn’t provide this option, I totally understand your teaching philosophy. But I think your teaching philosophy makes more sense for an honors curriculum, not curriculum that markets itself as equivalent to college-level work. At my school, we had a place for kids who want to be beaten over the head with “unnecessary” workloads because they want to be toughened up. And we had a place for kids who want to be “sufficiently” pushed. IMHO, this is ideal.
I’m not disagreeing with any of this. I just think that if a kid wants a “sink or swim” teaching approach, it should be provided as long as resources allow it. Because “sink or swim” is the way of the world. Some of us really need a strong kick in the ass to reach our full potential. I totally understand that some of us don’t want that and would suffer under such treatment.
Right. Which is why I’m not advocating “weed out” curricula for every kid. If a school can support multiple levels of “pushing”, then why not provide those levels? I don’t see how it benefits anyone to have general education and AP education, without any middle ground. It’s no wonder why you’d have kids who aren’t that prepared entering in your classroom. There’s no decent alternative for them.
Well, you are preaching to the choir. As I said, I have qualms with the weed-out philosophy. But I’m a realistic. I know the shit isn’t going away. And despite your beliefs, I personally do not think I would have been able to survive my college weed-outs without having gone though the experience in HS. Because HS competition is simply different. I knew that flunking out of AP, while embarrassing, wasn’t going to be the end of the world. Why? Because there was still an decent cushion for me in the form of a “honors” class. Take that safety net away, and hell yeah it would have been soul-crushing and devastating. But if I had flunked out of college calc, I might have been so discouraged that I might have changed majors, transferred to a less prestigous school (horrible idea for a minority student), or dropped out of college. Getting a glimpse of college life when I was a kid really empower me to take on some “unnecessary” challenges (like applying to the engineering school that few thought would accept me).
Well, I wouldn’t forbid a student either. But if I think I would feel a bit weird if a student came to me and told me he wanted to be in, say, AP physics, even though he was a horrible math student, and I didn’t have the ovaries to tell him, “Well, son, you’ve got to take a couple of pre-requisites first.” It wouldn’t be fair to throw him in a class with kids more advanced than he is, and it would make my job needlessly hard. I also think it would demonstrate poor faith in the other teachers on my team to take on that responsibility. But I’m not a teacher, so <shrug>
While you are absolutely correct that the same “opportunity hoarding” mentality can infect honors classes, I believe they at least act as a pressure valve on the “opportunity hoarding” of AP. Instead of only 30 kids getting the best education the school has to offer, you can get 60.
I don’t know what you think I’m okay with. I’m not okay with AP being reserved for only the privileged. I’m totally fine with an open enrollment framework. I am not okay with AP being the sole hope for the segment of the student body who wants to go to college. That’s a crazy idea to me, because I believe all students who want to go to college (good colleges) should be given that opportunity, not just the ones who are lucky enough to get their butts in the AP class. I don’t have a problem with weed-out curricula provided that there are equally good options available (like advanced courses that involve more hand-holding) for those who don’t thrive under that approach. I don’t have a problem with schools fostering an academically competitive environment even when it is obvious not all the kids will receive equal benefit from it. Because the real world is also competitve. As long as schools provide services that enable equal access to opportunity, I have no problem with there being disparities of outcome.
I’m not a virulent racist or classist. But if I know the AP calc kids at the fancy prep school are doing xyz assignments, I want my kid to have a close approximation of that experience (especially if I’m spending umpity-ump dollars in property taxes). Because these are the kids my kid will be competing against in college admissions and beyond. I don’t want my kid to be the dumb-bunny in calc 101. I want him to get an easy A out of it, the same as the fancy prep school kid. If you tell me that your AP calc class is going to be a lot less competitive than the fancy prep school’s AP calc class, then why wouldn’t I have serious regrets about sending my kid to public school?
(My college actually did an okay job with improving the matriculation rates of minority and disadvantaged students by providing free tutorial sessions and study groups. I benefited a whole lot from these services. Seems to me a high school could do something similiar.)
I think that is excellent, really. But I personally did not take AP courses to do well on the exam. I did it to get that extra extra push throughout the school year. When I look back on what I learned, I think of the amazing papers and projects I was assigned. I think of the bad-ass exams that my instructors gve us. But I really don’t remember the AP exams all that much.
I’ve met many AP alums who ended up flunking out of college. So AP by itself really doesn’t mean that much to me, to be honest.
I totally agree. But on the other hand, what is the point of a high school when its basic offerings don’t prepare students for college, and the only way you can get that preparation is by pleading for access into the AP program?? That strikes me as very wrong. I don’t want my hypothetical kid signing up for AP just because the alternative means flipping burgers for the rest of his life.
I am going to respond in a paragraph because that’s way to many sub-sub-sub divides to follow. I’m going to try to hit your main points, but if I don’t respond to something you find interesting, let me know. It wasn’t deliberate.
One, I understand you to be saying that you don’t think that kids should be denied the opportunity to try, just that they should be frankly advised. If that’s the case, we don’t disagree. I am talking about schools where you have to have a certain GPA, pass a test, or have a recommendation to get into a course. I think that’s bullshit. I’m fine with prerequisites–you have to have had pre-cal for calculus–and I’m fine with very blunt advice, but I don’t think it’s a school’s place to flat out tell a kid that he can’t try. Find him space.
Furthermore, I think once you have a kid you shouldn’t do bullshit to run him off. Don’t “dumb down” the course, but don’t make your summer reading impossible not because it furthers anyone’s education but because you want to “clear the bottom kids out of there”. Don’t require kids to buy an expensive book and let those who can’t afford it flunk and drop out, and blame their “unwillingness to commit”.
Second, in terms of having honors classes, I don’t know why some districts do and some don’t. I see your point and understand what you mean, but the reality is that the existence of “honors courses” lets people keep the AP classes white/Asian/affluent and put the capable brown kids into the “good enough” option. The data is very clear–minority kids with the same PSAT scores do not end up in AP classes. This is such a persistent problem that I tend to think it is reason enough to not have those courses. You don’t have to dumb the AP classes down or slow everything down for the “bottom”. There are ways to differentiate within a class. And AP courses are defined. You teach the course.
And while you can pull up a kid without the foundation, its going to take dedication and time - from the kid, from the teacher, from the other adults. Most schools are short on resources and most of the teachers I know don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to a kid who needs that much help - just getting the ones who are adequately prepared through AP coursework can be tough.
My kid’s high school is a first ring suburb. Its diverse - racially and economically. The largest nearby employer is 3M- so a lot of the socio-economically advantaged kids have college educated and math literate parents. Being in a first ring suburb of a major city means that we have a lot of resources that can be used.
The number of levels of coursework offered in high school is variable. For the required by the state to graduate Chemistry course you can take AP Chem, College Prep Chem, Community Chemistry (a year, colleges will take it as a year of Chemistry - but it doesn’t prep you for a STEM career), and Chemistry Essentials (the 2 trimesters required by the state that is set up for kids not moving on to a four year school). But we only offer ONE level of Biology - so the kid heading to AP Chem next year intending to PreMed might be lab partners in 10th grade with the kid taking Chem Essentials to just get a high school degree.
We don’t offer honors classes, but we offer both college prep classes as well as AP coursework - and then the standard coursework for kids not intending on moving on. If you want to go to a selective school (not even a highly selective school) the AP coursework is recommended. But there are plenty of schools who will take the college prep coursework, and the state community colleges are open enrollment - you can get in with just a high school degree.
We additionally have two other options for college ready kids
CIS (College in the Schools) My daughter is in a CIS Spanish Class - its a University of Minnesota credit and curriculum, taught to their standards. If she doesn’t do PSEO next year, she’ll have CIS Poly Sci and CIS Micro (the school doesn’t teach those courses AP - only CIS - which I like better - there isn’t an AP test, its a UofM credit - you get it or you don’t).
PSEO (Post Secondary Enrollment Option) - you go to college, tuition free. You can take a few courses, or you can go full time. You get co-credit at the institution as well as at the high school.
That’s the options at the high end. My favorite of these is CIS - it leaves the kids in an age appropriate environment. It provides a challenge. It prepares them for college in a supportive place. Its actually college work - with college essays and a midterm and a final. My least favorite is the AP coursework. Its teach to the test. Colleges like it on applications though. PSEO is a REALLY NICE option - some of the students start full time PSEO at the University of Minnesota at the start of their Junior year in high school - and will graduate from high school as Juniors at the UofM - that saves their parents a ton in tuition. However, the UofM is not a supportive place, and there aren’t a lot of fifteen and sixteen year olds ready for full time college at a place like that.
My son has been on the trade school path - but he’s done college ready coursework - his English coursework wasn’t AP, but it was college prep. The assumption is that if you can handle the work, they’ll put you through high school without closing the door on college - that means a high school college prep English - four years including a year of Comp and a year of Lit, three years of Science, Math through Trig (two years of Algebra are required by the state barring having a special need), four years of Social Science. He took the year long Community Chem - which colleges will check off as a year of chemistry
Below him the coursework is “get you through, but your ACT/SAT scores will be low enough that you’ll be taking some makeup work in college.” And THAT’S OK. My girlfriend teaches remedial English at one of the community colleges. Not everyone needs to have Harvard as their aspiration.
Below that yet are special education classrooms for everything from learning disabilities to behavioral issues to drug abuse issues. One of my son’s former friends is trying to graduate by attending the districts special education center. It is awesome that we have it, but in my experience, its really a difficult place to meet needs - the needs of a kid who is struggling to graduate because of eighteen months of chemo are very different than the one who doesn’t give a damn and those are very different than the kid who has learning disabilities. They all end up in the same place (unless the kid with cancer can keep up - but when you struggle to graduate, that’s where you end up).
Our graduation rate is above 85%. But that still means more than 1 in ten kids won’t make it through high school - even with courses like Chemistry Essentials. That worries me a lot more than not everyone getting into the AP courses that highly selective colleges look for. I’m grateful for the high end options - but a 15% drop out rate from high school scares me far more than kids who actually have to take all the coursework required in college because they haven’t had an opportunity to pass AP tests.
I don’t doubt you but do you have a cite to this data? I’d be interested to see this.
And when you have differentiation does the teacher have to spend an inordinate amount of their time teaching to the bottom to get them up to that defined standard?
And, of course, whatever is the reason he needs pulling up is not gone.
That said, I still think it’s a lot easier to differentiate instruction and give a broader range of “starting abilities” a chance than teachers are willing to admit.
There’s more detail in the link, but here’s the most directquote:
Not in my experience. There aren’t hordes of terribly unprepared kids fighting to get in.
Dangerosa, options are always good, and I’m glad your district has so many. What I am arguing about is stopping kids from trying to push themselves. Gate-keeping advanced courses–explicitly or practically–leads to terrible injustice.
I think it probably is - and you certainly have the experience that backs it up.
We definitely agree. Additionally, I think that some of the dropout rate I talked about is related to not having those kids push themselves. They get bored. They aren’t engaged. They start to act out because they are bored. And if they are a white middle or upper class kid - they get assessed and maybe put on ADHD medication - and if they aren’t, they are far less likely to be diagnosed as anything other than trouble.
And gating based off of ability to purchase a book is abhorrent. So is gating a class by making it so homework intensive that you can’t hold a job - which a lot of lower income kids need to do.
I do think its better to catch these kids earlier than when they’d be taking AP coursework - making sure they aren’t gated way back when they are sorted into first grade reading groups.
(In some ways I miss a “gentleman’s C” - you want to take an AP course, take it. You won’t fail it unless you refuse to do the work. But show up, do the work - get a C - or even a D. You won’t have failed. The course will apply to graduation. You’ll have the credit at least as a reward for having taken the risk and TRIED. Maybe you won’t pass the AP test, but the class itself will show up on your records)
I’d like to ask, can that support come from someone other than parents? I know many groups which have after school programs where kids can get help from tutors.
In my experience, it can - but its very hard to find qualified volunteer tutors.
As I said, we live basically next to the 3M campus. 3M supports Engineers who would like to give volunteer hours to the school to tutor math. We can’t get them. 3M will give them the time, but there isn’t enough interest among the engineers. The ones that do show, get frustrated.
We’ve also had Americorp tutors - but they really vary in quality. Most of them are only math literate through Algebra themselves and some of them can’t write a college quality paper.
Then there is the problem with hours. A privileged kid whose Mom has a college degree but doesn’t work - Mom is at their beck and call - my daughter is still at rehearsal - when she gets home, I’m here if she needs homework help. If she needed the school’s tutors, she’d miss rehearsal for drama. And while academics are important - also important to future college success is being a well rounded person.