No, I don’t think it is. I don’t blame a child for growing up in a culture where education is not greatly valued.
Having attended school in shitty neighborhoods, I think culture has a lot more to do with it than schools derailing students.
There’s an interesting wrinkle in here, too: top schools don’t rank anymore. Highly selective colleges get 40% of their applicants from schools that don’t rank. This keeps many more of those kids competitive in the races for scholarship/grant money. And there’s good reason not to rank, objectively: top schools have lots and lots of strong kids, and it’s not meaningful to describe a kid as “second quartile” in that sort of situation–we have like 20% of our kids with almost straight As, and I can show you test scores to support that. But schools with lots of very good kids that aren’t savvy to this are squishing a lot of kids out of the running while other schools are filling up the race.
They are very flexible if the parent calls, and its the RIGHT parent. My son’s best friend, whose mother works for the district, had no trouble with a late change from the higher level Algebra to the lower - with a negotiated C for having attempted the work. Other parents have reported that the school has said that is their policy and they expect the children to be adults (a line I have heard myself - we ate the D+ - it was my son).
Weighted, about 30 out of a class of 400. Unweighted - a dozen or more
Its a challenging program - it isn’t grade inflation. But kids are under incredible pressure to get a 4.0. I know kids who are grounded for two months if they get an A- and a girlfriend of mine who teaches has parents regularly calling her because their straight A student is getting a B in her studio arts class.
I also think that one cannot say an A average at one high school in a bad area is equivalent to an A at a high school in another.
I used to teach at Kansas City Missouri schools. Many teachers would work out deals with kids and give them A’s if they just didnt cause trouble. Other kids, I was told by the principal to pass the kid because he was a gang member and they needed him out of the school. Other kids, well they went thru “graduation” but they didnt get a diploma, they were handed a record that they had attended. But then since colleges dont actually ask to see a students physical diploma, thats basically all they need to get into colleges.
Kansas City Missouri school were stripped of accreditation in 2011. They have sort of earned it back.Schools in St. Louis are the same.
So how the heck can a college take a diploma from a high school which isnt even accredited?
IME the college asks for a transcript, not a diploma. The transcript stars whether you received a degree.
Yes, a diploma is like those hospital “birth certificates” with the baby’s feet. It’s for show.
They’ll take a homeschool diploma. But they’ll generally want other supporting material.
And what they want and how they weight it varies greatly by school. Some schools want ACT tests. Some want SAT tests. Some want essays. Some want a transcript filled with AP coursework and 3s or higher on the AP tests (which doesn’t show up on your transcript - it shows up on your AP report). Some weight recommendations highly.
My daughter’s target school only wants test scores if they will improve your chances. A 1100 SAT score isn’t going to do anything for them - leave it out. And they are as interested in recommendations than grades.
Then they look for diversity. I have a niece who had a 4.0 from one of the countries top high schools. But she is a white, East Coast, big city girl - do you know how many applications Princeton gets from young women just like her? Maybe a kid from rural Indiana will make a bigger difference in discussions than another woman that has had similar experiences to five already in the class. (She did go to Vassar).
Ivies and their ilk tend to heavily weight the essay. The GPAs are all pretty high. The SAT scores are all pretty high. So the essay is really the differentiation.
Colleges are well aware of grade inflation. They are well aware of which high schools are highly rated and which are not. They know which states produce good students and which states don’t - and at the same time they know that a kid who managed a 1400 SAT out of a Mississippi public high school probably has some serious skills - far more than a kid from a private school in Connecticut with the same score.
You won’t get a selective school to look at you with a 2.0 and a 800 SAT score - unless you are bringing something else to the table. But you can bring a 4.0 to the table and get passed over.
(Selective in college admissions is different than highly selective. Harvard is highly selective. A school that admits about half its applicants - instead of Harvard’s 5% - is selective)
I am just going to address what I see as the major points:
The author bases this basically on anecdote. I will agree that AP classes can feel very different than college classes, and that the bar to get a particular grade may be lower (see the “gentleman’s C” discussion), but there’s a lot of research and on-going calibration to make sure that the kids that get qualifying scores are roughly on par with the relevant college class. They hire tons of college people as consultants and do a great deal of field testing of items in actual college classes. It’s true that you can get a 3 on a great many AP exams without a deep and rich knowledge base, but, honestly, you can get a C in a great many college courses as well without a deep and rich knowledge base. And a 3 is calibrated to a C.
If anecdotes are evidence, the kids I’ve had who made 4s and 5s on AP exams went on to the next course in college and report being well-prepared. The 3s maybe not so much–but that’s exactly what happens in college if you squeeze out a C in one class and go to the next.
This is a vastly complex issue. It’s true that highly selective schools give limited credit for AP exams, but those schools use AP scores in admissions: it’s a much more nuanced view of what a student already knows and gives you a lot more confidence that a student will be successful. Harvard isn’t going to give you AP credit, but you’re not getting in if you got a bunch of 2s and 3s on AP exams. And if you didn’t take any exams for whatever reason, you will need to find alternate ways to demonstrate your skills. SLACs may not take much because the whole point of a SLAC is the experience–but they usually take some, up to a cap.
But community colleges and regional state universities? They live and die by their completion rate and they take tons of AP credit. Now, it’s possible that some of your AP credit won’t help you–for example, you could pass both AP English tests and they only require one, or there just isn’t any requirement that Art History satisfies for your program–but that’s not the same thing.
Even places like Northwestern and SMU take a surprising amount of AP credit. Easily enough to cut a semester off your time in college. And the flagship state universities tend to take it as well.
I think I’ve shown that while the pass rates have declined slightly, the absolute numbers passing has increased dramatically. If those kids “who don’t belong there” were not only hopeless themselves but actually pulling down the kids who would otherwise have been successful, the decline would be a lot more dramatic–to the point that absolute numbers were affected.
This is the same guy who thinks 2/3 of the kids in there don’t belong there? I admit that access to AP courses is limited. Working pretty hard for my whole life to fix that. I don’t see how not having AP would help.
The decision to make AP classes small at the expense of regular classes is wrong-headed at best. But when it occurs, it’s an outgrowth of the mindset that the “smart kids” deserve the best and that is not going to change if you get rid of AP classes. Places shuttling extra resources to a subset of kids will continue to do so.
One, I do think there’s something to be said for some sort of standardization. I grew very frustrated in college when so many courses I took focused more on a professor’s personal interests than in the fundamental knowledge I needed to even understand those interests. Biology shouldn’t be all ecology or all cellular or all evolution or whatever just because it’s what the teacher likes to teach.
Two, AP courses are really pretty flexible and are striving to be more so. English has always let you read what you want to read–as opposed to IB, which has a list of books you have to choose from. There’s been a massive redesign of many AP courses over the last decade to make them less about retention of facts and more about application.
Having worked in shitty schools far longer than you attended them, and with a much broader perspective of what goes on behind the scenes, I think schools can often be a deciding factor.