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<p>Why not? Why does the bright kid not deserve to get his needs met while the failing one does? I understand we don’t need trophy hunting AP classes, but Calculus? There is no extra cost to the system if the kid is in a calculus class vs algebra 2.</p>
<p>Our problem is the drop out rate, not the fail rate. Kids who stay in school are tutored etc. but most can’t be bothered to stay. So far, DS’s school has lost 30% of the kids that started 9th grade with him.</p>
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<p>Yes. why not? It would be different if AP-Calc were not offered and the sophomore demanded that it be. But if it is offered, why not let the sophomore take it along with the juniors and seniors? What does it have to do with seniors who cannot pass the math portion of the high school exit exam? They’ll never be in the same classes. In our school, however, a LOT of resources are devoted to these struggling students.</p>
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Algebra 2 needs to be offered to all college bound students – in my state, they can’t qualify for admission to the state universities without it. Calculus is nice to have, but at any given high school a much smaller proportion of students will be enrolling in the course. Neither of my kid’s high schools offered AP Calc, and my daughter’s high school didn’t offer calculus at all. (Students who wanted the course could sign up for an online course given via the school, but they didn’t tend to do very well in that environment). In order to offer the AP course, the schools would have had to hire new teacher qualified to teach the class – in a setting where they could expect enrollment to be quite low. </p>
<p>I don’t see how either of my kids were deprived. Here in California, high school students can enroll in community college courses for free – and if my son had wanted a more advanced math course he could have enrolled in one. He actually did consider accelerating his math track by taking a summer or evening class at the cc, but he had an excellent math teacher in high school who he respected a lot who advised against it… so he stuck with the track that he had. I don’t see how it hurt him in any way. </p>
<p>On the other hand, my daughter took algebra II in a class with 48 students. I think it would have been nice if her high school could have had another competent math teacher on staff, so that the class size would be smaller – she had a tough time with math and would have benefited from more attention from her teacher. If I had been in charge of allocating the budget, I would have looked at fixing the algebra II problem ahead of the calculus problem at her school. Of course an ideal solution would have been to hire an additional math teacher who could have taught both calculus and algebra II – but the reality was that the funds were limited and we were stuck with the staff we had.</p>
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My reality is that it is NOT offered, or if it IS available there is no more room in the class. OR … that it may be very possible for space to be made for one sophomore… but opening the class up to sophomores in general will create a demand that can’t be filled – which is the experience I had when my son took algebra as an 8th grader, and when my daughter took biology as a 9th grader (normally a 10th grade course at her school at the time.)</p>
<p>Keilaxandra,-- there is something I don’t get. In post #99 you wrote that a math/science focus is “not my interest” – but then by post #150 you were griping because you weren’t allowed to take algebra in 6th grade, even though you were “Prepared” for it. </p>
<p>Do you understand that there is a huge difference between a kid who might be “prepared” for an advanced class but is not particularly interested in it – and another kid who is chomping at the bit because he is far ahead of his classmates and wants nothing more than to be allowed to move ahead in that class? Because it seems to me that your attitude really exemplifies why a high school with limited resources would want to be discreet about what was available to the students who truly were exceptional. What starts out as an effort to accommodate the unique needs of an outlier becomes turns into something that other students and parents see as an entitlement – and pretty soon the competitive instincts of parents who want to see their kids (ready or not) on the the highest perceived “track” takes over, and kids who really aren’t particularly strong in math or interested are pressured to accelerate.</p>
<p>And that’s exactly what leads to the madness of kids taking 12 or 15 APs because their high school happens to offer 22, and they want to have a leg up on elite admissions and have their gc’s check the “most challenging curriculum” box, and their parents have figured out that whatever the “top” track is, they have to make sure that their kid is on it. </p>
<p>Unfortunately – as I posted above – I don’t think the AP system is the best approach to college prep, because many of the AP courses try to cram in too much information to prepare for the test, and don’t give the students the foundational level of understanding and analytical skills they will need to succeed in college. I think many of those kids will get to college and be in for a rude awakening, especially if they end up at elite colleges – because they find that the college expectations are very different than the content-focused approach of the AP courses. </p>
<p>I also have to say, as the parent of a kid at an elite, highly competitive college, that self-advocacy skills and individual initiative are absolutely critical to survival and success in that environment. There are many times when my daughter would have had problems that would have made her college career difficult or unpleasant if she didn’t have the willingness to push beyond the “rules” to get changes made to her schedule, such as being allowed to change to a different class section or get into desired classes with limited enrollment. </p>
<p>Colleges tend to be rather complex bureaucracies with sometimes labyrinthian sets of requirements for course enrollment, breadth & distribution requirements, class placement, major requirements, etc. – and the academic decisions are made by various semi-autonomous academic departments where department heads and individual professors often have a significant amount of flexibility in making various determinations. The student who expects that someone will notify them of various opportunities, or who believes that every guideline or written rule is set in stone may be at a significant disadvantage. For example, one student may give up on a desire to pursue a double major or have difficulty graduating on time because they can’t fill all the requirements or fit all needed courses in their schedule… while another student overcomes those barriers by arranging to take a certain course out of sequence or petitioning for a waiver or modification of a given requirement. </p>
<p>(The same problems come up in not-so-competitive environments as well – that can be part of the reason why some kids have difficulty graduating on time at public universities and other kids at the same universities are able to have double majors and graduate early. Sometimes the coveted spots in over-subscribed classes simply end up going to the students who are the most persistent).</p>
<p>Melin, I’m just guessing, perhaps you would have been better off at your intended school after all…maybe it would have taught you some basic knowledge of grammar and of sanity?</p>
<p>From my D. experience of getting accepted to very selective programs (althougg at state schools, not Ivy / Elite), her HS was a heavy factor, not so much number of AP’s. Her small private HS had very limited number of AP’s offerred. However, couple of top kids (out of class of 30 - 50) usually end up at Harvard and such. D (college junior) credits her HS with great preparation for college in comparison to others (she is in Honors and surrounded by Private HS’s valedictorians). Specifically, her Chemistry background (no AP) landed her a job as Supplemental Instructor (was hand picked by prof.) and her writing skills made college English Honors class a breath and helping her tremendously in writing lab reports and all sorts of papers, applications…et. What it seems is that college admissions are taking HS that kids graduated from into account, they are aware of level of college prep. from some schools based of their previous experience with kids from these schools. D. was accepted into program that had 10 spots for incoming freshmen.</p>
<p>The reality is that a school has a fixed number of students. No matter how they are distributed among classes, it still has to educate all of them, whether in Algebra 2 or AP-Calc. Our high school has a ceiling of 30 per class. Just because a 9th grader qualifies for Calc does not make Algebra 2 redundant. There will still be 29 students requiring algebra 2. My reality is that AP classes are often underpopulated. Keep in mind that outliers are outliers for a reason: they are very few. Adding one or two 9th graders to AP-Calc will not cause the ceiling to be reached. In fact, the smaller size of AP classes compared to the CP and Honors classes has been a constant source of grumbling among teachers of the latter.</p>
<p>it appears that Keilexandra is a bit Pollyannaish. Most public schools are not positioned to offer everything to everyone. As another poster mentioned, if students were suddenly offered a plethora of choices, eventually no one would have access to any additional programs. Money is tight and there are limited resources everywhere. </p>
<p>Additionally, there is a big difference between “wanting” an accelerated track and being qualified for that track. In order for my S to move ahead in math, he took the final exam (in a class that he never took, with almost no preparation) and scored very well. My guess is that no one else in his class was qualified to accelerate, so there would have been no point in “offering” the program to anyone else.</p>
<p>Tell me, Keilexandra, if a physician told you that you needed a particular operation and instead of listening to her and scheduling the procedure, you decided to do some research and you found a better option, would the physician be obligated to offer that option to all of her other patients? No - most physicians want to follow established medical protocols, but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t do the best thing for yourself.</p>
<p>I thought Calmom’s analogy was interesting, because in her shoes I would never have given the first kid an icecream bar knowing there weren’t any for the other kids. Schools act like this is the case, but the truth is they should be giving accommodations to every kid who needs them. If only a few middle kid need to take advanced math - it may involve going to take the class at the high school (which is what my son did with parents carpooling to get them to the middle school for 2nd period.) If there are more - you can create a class in the middle school. It’s not that hard. Instead of acting like there’s never been an advanced math student before (which they did for me) they can start looking for the kids who potentially should be on a different track. Any teacher at my son’s elementary school could have told the middle school that my son was unusually gifted in math/computer science, but they didn’t want to know it. I’m happy to say, that while there still is no formal math acceleration program at the middle school they seem to be getting used to the idea that these kids do exist. I do think it’s unfair to expect parents to know how our school system works, or to expect kids to be pushy. (Though I’ll be the first one to admit my son got accelerated because he complained to me about school being too easy from first grade on.)</p>
<p>Subject acceleration costs school districts very little money. The most it might cost is transporting a kid between schools. (We used the parent carpool, but I know another child went in a school van - they just time deliveries between schools that would otherwise be made anyway with his schedule.)</p>
<p>calmom - So if the “secret” math track was only on a space-available basis, and only one space is available, why should YOUR child be given that space? Offer the opportunity to qualify for the class and lottery the space. If the school doesn’t have resources to accommodate everyone who qualifies, then so be it–but everyone should have equal access.</p>
<p>You don’t need to open up a class to “all sophomores”–only all sophomores who qualify, and if that number is greater than the number of available spaces, use a random selection to decide.</p>
<p>As a zero-gen immigrant (moved to Canada at age 3), I can only speak for what I’ve observed in Chinese immigrant communities in Newfoundland and Delaware. The parents who do not have a perfect command of English tend to be on the whole less well-informed and much less eager to talk to the administration on their child’s behalf.</p>
<p>Wrt to my own situation, math/science is not my interest, but I actually receive my highest grades in math, consistently. Just because I have less interest but perfectly competent ability, means that the option to take a higher math course should be taken away from me?</p>
<p>Self-advocacy is indeed a great advantage. But that is a side effect of life, not a just situation. Financial wealth is a great advantage, too, yet the colleges who can afford to do so will grant a small boost to poor students.</p>
<p>Olive - You do not seem to understand the distinction between “offered” and “allowed.” Just because a course is offered to everyone does not mean that everyone is suddenly allowed to take it! Every course has prerequisites; e.g. for a sophomore to take AP Calc, perhaps the prerequisite is a certain score on a school-administered placement exam. The school can determine what level of excellence in math is required to be qualified to accelerate. And if, after this, there are still too many students for too few slots–that’s what lotteries are for.</p>
<p>If I were a physician and a patient had researched a better alternative to the usual treatment–and I agreed with her that this alternative was indeed better, reasonable, affordable, etc.–then yes, I would “offer” it to all of my other patients suffering from the same ailment. “By the way, I heard about this new treatment that you might want to consider…”</p>
<p>keilelexandra:</p>
<p>In my school, if there were more students who wanted a particular class than spaces available, another class would be opened.
The history of our school is indeed interesting. It was started because a number of families had wanted to enroll their children in a particular program and were told that all available spaces had already been filled. They agitated for another program to be opened on the model of the full school. It since became one of the most desirable schools, together with the original one and another one launched later, also on the same pedagogical model. I realize that not all districts or schools are as accommodating. But the students who did not get into their first choice still had to be educated. And there were enough of them to start another school. And, later, yet another.</p>
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That’s why I chose that analogy. A very typical, and frustrating, response when parents seek specific accommodations for their kids (or when kids are self-advocating later on) – is for the school to say, “we can’t do that for you because if we did, we would have to do it for everybody”. So the result becomes – the kid who needs something different is denied out of “fairness” to the others. </p>
<p>The result, quite simply, is NOT that any kid who wants can go to the neighboring high school for algebra – it is that NO kids are offered algebra. </p>
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<p>Where I live there is NO extra money. ZERO. When my son was in school, there was talk of the district going into bankruptcy. Over the years I’ve seen cycles of teacher layoffs and cutbacks. Getting extras generally involved parent fundraisers - and that’s not going to work unless you have a critical mass of parents who want to raise the funds. There was definitely no such thing as the district providing transportation anywhere. The entire district-wide budget for the gifted program was about $10,000 one year, and I think that came from a donation, because it was -0- the next.</p>
<p>Calmom - when I say very little most of the time it IS zero. The kid walks to the classroom next door. The parents pick up the slack and do the carpooling. It didn’t cost our school a dime to educate my son at a more advanced level in math than usual. And in return they got a kid who made the school look good. I think it was a win-win situation.</p>
<p>^Indeed, we’ve experienced both the willingness to accelerate (costing zero) and the unwillingness to accelerate (would have cost zero).</p>
<p>More egregious than preventing our S from going next door for a more advanced curriculum was the unwillingness to let him join a group of students a grade above him in the same class space (it was a combined grade class) taught by the same homeroom teacher. The reasoning was not “if I make an exception…” but “I don’t believe in tracking.” In other words, a third grader should be taking third-grade math even if he was well beyond third grade knowledge.
Years later, a teacher urged us to advocate for radical acceleration and offered us this example: A blind student needed accommodation and the district found a teacher to work with her. But the blind student did not work well with that teacher, so the district paid for her to be ferried to another district by taxi every day so she could work with a teacher that was more congenial.</p>
<p>Money did not enter into the decision to accommodate that blind student; neither did it enter the decision NOT to accommodate our kid. When he was eventually accelerated, he just walked to the high school together with another accelerated kid. Neither school nor district had to spend a single penny for their acceleration.</p>
<p>calmom - As I have said before, I don’t have much sympathy for the egregious situation where kids with strong-advocate parents are denied acceleration, when this leads to clear disparity (e.g. the only way around the “offer it to everyone” dilemma is to keep the accomodation a secret/“exception”). If the choices are as follows:</p>
<p>a) Make an exception for one student and keep it a secret so that no other students can pursue the exception unless they or their parents make a similar fuss;
b) Don’t allow exceptions for anyone;</p>
<p>I would choose option B. Kids with advocate parents will find a way to learn appropriate math outside the school curriculum; kids with non-advocate parents would not have been helped anyway. And policy remains fair. Of course, if possible, I would actually choose option C:</p>
<p>c) Make an exception for one student and “offer” the newly created option to all qualified students, where the school defines who is qualified. If, for whatever reason, only one “acceleration space” is available and more than one student is deemed qualified to accelerate, choose the student through a random selection.</p>
<p>I sympathize with school budget problems; my own high school, a public charter, has perpetual budget issues. Sometimes it isn’t possible to open up another class, and there may be 0-1 openings in the existing class. (Or, only certain students may be able to fit their schedule around the existing class openings.) Well, that’s why lotteries were invented–to choose X students/winners from Y pool for X spaces.</p>
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<p>There was no secret math track – there was an accommodation that we requested. It didn’t exist before we asked for it. I think it existed afterward – someone told me that the following year several kids were able to take algebra that way, apparently because they had a positive experience with my son.</p>
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Again… no option was taken away from you. You never took the initiative to seek another option. So you do not know, to this day, what would have happened if you had asked. </p>
<p>When my daughter was in 1st grade, she asked her teacher to give her harder work. She told her teacher that the spelling words were too easy, and asked for a list of tougher words. She thought the arithmetic problems were too easy, and asked for harder problems. The teacher readily accommodated – she asked my daughter to create her own lists of words to study and then tested my daughter on those words at the end of each week; I think for the math the teacher simply used worksheets on hand for somewhat more advanced students. </p>
<p>If you are sitting in a classroom doing what is given to you and doing it well – that’s great. But there are always going to be students who want more and ask for it. In a group of 20 or 30 students (elementary school) – or 300 students (college) – the teachers aren’t going to be aware of or notice the needs of the students who are doing well UNLESS they ask for it. If a kid get A’s on every exam, the teacher doesn’t know if that kid studied all night to learn the material, or if the kid is so far ahead of the pack that she is acing all the exams without study or prep. The kid who works hard for those A’s certainly deserves those grades, but is not necessarily ready to move on to a higher class. </p>
<p>Since the topic of this thread is “most challenging curriculum” in terms of college admission – I will tell you that it is those self-challenging, proactive kids that the colleges really are looking for, not the ones who are simply aspiring to whatever it the highest “track” available in their school. The whole notion of a “track” is actually something that is limiting. </p>
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Self-advocacy is a tool available to any individual, rich or poor, from any ethnic background – and it can be developed at any time. </p>
<p>It ALSO is the sort of thing that the elite colleges are looking for in potential students. Very often, when they <em>say</em> they are looking for “leadership”, they <em>mean</em> that they are looking for the type of student who is a strong advocate for herself as well as for others – they don’t just mean they want whichever kid happened to win the vote for class President. The difference between a “leader” and a “follower” has a lot to do with whether the individual accepts the status quo, or actively seeks to change things. </p>
<p>High schools offer all sorts of activities that can help kids develop confidence and advocacy skills, such as debate or mock trial. So a person who feels that they lack that “advantage” can work on those skills. </p>
<p>Again – these are LIFE skills.</p>
<p>Calmom, requesting an accommodation and having it granted means that you’ve just created a secret math track. Or are you defining “secret math track” in some way that isn’t apparent to me? I assume that you requested the accommodation in time for your S to change his schedule that year, so there would also be enough time for other qualified students to try to change their schedules. Similarly, let’s say a school had two hard-of-hearing students, both of whom knew how to read lips. However, one student was more comfortable with an ASL interpreter, so he asked for the extra accommodation and was granted it. Should the school offer the interpreter’s service to the other hard-of-hearing student? My answer would be yes. In this case, both students clearly have similar qualifications; to translate to a math acceleration situation, the “hard-of-hearing” students would be equivalent to the qualified math students, where the school has previously determined who is qualified to accelerate.</p>
<p>An option, once given to someone, now exists. It should not REQUIRE initiative to exercise. If I had asked, perhaps the school would indeed have accommodated me as well–but my point is that I, and anyone else in a similar situation, should not have to ask if the accommodation has already been granted to an ability-equivalent student.</p>
<p>I’m glad that you are teaching your children life skills in advocacy from an early age. Many student do not have the benefit of such savvy parents. </p>
<p>I don’t necessary agree with your statement that “the kid who works hard for those A’s certainly deserves those grades, but is not necessarily ready to move on to a higher class.” That decision is up to the student, the parent, and the school–and the school obviously has final authority. If the school is concerned that the bar of qualification is set too low, they could use a harder -beyond grade level- test for qualifying. Or maybe you have to have a 96+ average, instead of simply a 93+ average.</p>
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I wholeheartedly disagree with the portion of your statement that I have bolded. If a 6-year-old child, naturally shy in disposition, has parents who implicitly teach her through actions and words that her best guide through life is to always follow the rules and listen to authority, how is she to develop self-advocacy? Magic? Perhaps later in life, she might encounter a non-family mentor who will teach her those skills, or perhaps her personality will change on its own to be more assertive. The former requires teaching from a knowledgeable source, which is hardly available to any individual at any time; the latter may or may not happen, depending on fate and genetics. You tell me–is this 6-year-old girl–who may be a brilliant outlier, just not extroverted or having ever been taught self-advocacy–less deserving of the most challenging curriculum possible?</p>
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In fact, many students who aspire only to “the highest track available at their school” might pursue outside sources of challenge. I’ve never had any sort of formal instruction to sociology, and my parents neither know or care about the subject; but I can tell you a great deal about introductory race theory and the language of anti-racism activist discussion. That, to me (though of course I am biased), is at least as strong an indicator of being “self-challenging” and “proactive” as asking for an exceptional curriculum from school–perhaps moreso, given that many such exceptional curriculums were primarily engineered by parents.</p>
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Indeed–but for greatest curricular advantage, exceptional acceleration must be pursued at a far earlier age, with parental aid. An elementary school principal is not going to take a 6-year-old seriously, no matter how self-advocating, without parental support/pressure. </p>
<p>It seems to me that you are operating under two assumptions, correct me if I’m wrong:
<p>S1 took what was considered the highest level math class offered in middle school in 7th grade, along with several of his friends. In 8th grade there was no class for these kids. My DW met with the principal and was told S1 could retake the course he took in 7th grade (in which he earned an A). DW said not good enough, and received permission (after some intense discussion) for the kids to find an alternative. The kids went to a top math teacher and explained their plight, he offered to sign all of them up as TAs and, in exchange for a little tutoring, taught them the next level math course. No real credit on a transcript, but they all ended up in AP Calc AB as freshman. The kids finished all HS calc courses offered by sophomore year and many took online courses after that. I guess it worked out, but without an activist mother, some assertive kids, and a willing teacher it would have been a mess. I’m not sure they should be given credit for taking a more challenging curriculum than other students for whom all the pieces don’t fall into place. Some of it had to do with the kids’ skills, but that was but a small part. Receiving acceleration is fine, but in some cases benefiting from it when others don’t have access probably is not. Frankly, I think most admissions folks probably have a good handle on this.</p>
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<p>We saw this with D1 being allowed to take Algebra in 7th grade. One or two students per year were accelerated, with another handful of parents trying to have their child be similarly accelerated for competitive reasons only. The school handles this by making acceleration contingent on an algebra-readiness assessment and teacher approval. </p>
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<p>Except that schools don’t always do such a good job with deeming who is “qualified”. Sometimes they duck it entirely and just go with random.</p>
<p>When D1 was in 6th grade, the honors track was overfull. There were two honors classes, each with just over 40 (!) students per class. Given the school’s student to teacher ration, it wasn’t quite enough students to form three separate classes. The (mostly wonderful) teachers said that they’d manage if they could have some grading help. The students were OK with the situation. Most of the parents figured it was better to have their child in a class with a more challenging curriculum/better teachers, even if it was crowded. </p>
<p>Except for a few parents, who repeatedly called the school to complain about the large class size. The parents were told that they could transfer their child out to a smaller class. Not surprisingly, the callers didn’t want that solution–they wanted someone ELSE’S child transferred out. These parents started calling the district to complain, and eventually found a willing ear. At Back To School night, the school’s VP came into the classrooms to tell all the parents (most blissfully ignorant of the campaign to cut class size) that 8 children would be chosen at random from each of the honors track classes, and put into a newly constructed class that would be half honors kids, half regular kids, with different teachers. Factors like student’s grades the previous year, teacher recommendations, and whether the student was tagged as gifted or highly gifted weren’t going to be considered. Since there were more than a few kids who were in honors because their parents pushed them into the program, the random selection “to be fair” was anything but. </p>
<p>You can imagine how that went over with the parents. Most of us went home and fired off phone calls and emails right back to the district. The district gifted programs coordinator, in particular, was very interested to hear about the school’s “solution”, which violated district policy on gifted education. The school ended up backing down. Parents were told that if they wanted to have their child in a smaller class they were welcome to have their child switched to the half and half class. Oddly, no one was interested. :)</p>