http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/
The race/ethnicity may be outwardly obvious, but is the difference really due to parental educational attainment, as influenced by the US immigration system. Immigrants from China and India are much more heavily college educated, often coming to the US as PhD students. With high educational attainment parents, it may be no surprise that their kids achieve highly (even in the absence of tiger parenting). Of course, a critical mass of hypercompetitive tiger parents may influence the school environment in a negative way.
Yes, @TheGFG ‘s kids’ school is definitely one of Dante’s circles. That Kafka thing…
My kids are not the 12-AP kids. D has taken a few. And I’ve got to say, CC makes me appreciate our AP classes. No taling pages of notes, no translation of Kafka.
As to pre-learning, enrolling in the same class before taking it for a grade in school is, in my opinion, academic dishonesty. I don’t see hordes of underprivileged kids going that route nor do I see any comparison between that specific act and reading with my child.
Yes, that translation of Kafka from German to English in an English (not German) class seems like gratuitously useless extra work. If adding gratuitously useless extra work is the norm, perhaps that may be partly why students are under more stress and workload but are not getting any more advanced than they used to be.
Thanks for the link - some interesting vignettes, but also a clear editorial bias, in which the author calls it “Stockholm Syndrome” when kids want to attend more difficult classes.
So answer me this: if in a middle class to upper middle class town, all the children of varying ethnic backgrounds start out in kindergarten together, yet only representatives of two of the ethnic groups ever make it into advanced classes in high school, is this cause for concern? Could there be hidden barriers for blacks, Hispanics, and now whites too? Or do you believe white/black/Hispanic people simply don’t work hard enough or care enough about intellectual pursuits due to differences in parental educational attainment?
There is a limit to everything. There is a limit to the time one can devote to academic pursuits, as well. Encouraging students to exceed their natural limits–and everyone has them–also encourages cheating.
What we’re seeing in some school districts–by no means all–is the creeping extension of the high-pressure childhood described by William Fitzsimmons, Marlyn E. McGrath, and Charles Ducey in “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation.” The article was first published in 2000, then revised in 2011. You can find it on the Harvard admissions website, which makes sense, as they are respectively Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College, Director of Admissions, Harvard College, and Adjunct Lecturer in Psychology, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/preparing-college/should-i-take-time
I recommend the article for everyone who has been debating on this thread. Some excerpts:
I do wonder if this whole debate explains the yearly appearance on this forum of students and parents complaining that they (their child) were not chosen by an elite college, but that some “slacker” was chosen instead. Perhaps the “slacker” followed his or her own interests, had a summer job, did not take the same course twice (once in summer, once in the school year), and made a better impression when it was time to apply to college.
If you take off the racial lenses and compare only students whose parents have MA/MS/PhD degrees, do you find much of a racial difference in how the students are doing in school?
What a strange Prozess!
Fast moving thread thus far. When I talk to my kids about why they want to take AP/Honors classes, it doesn’t have to do with college credit, or higher GPA or class ranking, but they want to stay with their friends and not get stuck with non-academic students.
Given the shift to more and more Honors/AP classes, one would expect that overall high school test scores would improve. However, since test scores have remained static over the past few decades, what does that say for the rigor of the regular non-honors/AP classes? If more students are taking Honors/AP classes, could it be that drawing increasing numbers of smarter/more hard working students into Honors/AP classes has dumbed down the pool for non-honor classes? If so, how does that impact inequality that we constantly are told is a major problem with our society?
People have tried to make the point before, but some people just learn more easily than others. For some people, an AP course is no more difficult than a remedial course is for an average student.
I could walk into most law schools in this country and be told that I was to take a final exam in four days in a subject I’ve never taken. So long as I had access to a casebook, a horn book, a Law in a Nutshell, and a set of cold briefs, I would be likely to make in the top quarter of the class on the final, and might well post one of the top scores. And I would still go out for a few hours every night for those four pre-final days, because all work and no play makes Earl a dull boy.
There would be other students in that class who had attended every class and studied several hours every day all semester long, but nevertheless made a poor or even failing grade. You would think they would have an attitude of “Let us be glad for Earl,” but nooooo, you would be wrong. Instead they would snivel and whine and complain, and when the ABA accreditation committee would come to town they would all rush up to complain and the ABA would no doubt force the law school to adopt a class attendance policy, not because it served any purpose, but just because they got their fee-fees hurt.
It’s the same sort of thing with the AP classes. Some people can’t pass a lot of them, so they want to create a rule than no one can.
Thank you @Periwinkle. It’s very well said and exactly what I was fumbling to say.
Here’s my problem with what other people’s kids are doing: I’m a taxpayer who doesn’t want to fund schools that lead to kids throwing themselves in front of trains. If several kids a year are throwing themselves under trains, I take that as de facto evidence that we’re doing something wrong.
This is not good (from the Atlantic article):
Higher levels of cheating. Higher levels of drug abuse. Two or three times higher levels of depression. We’re getting it wrong here and we need to change something.
Seconded entirely with a couple of additional points:
- the graduate degree is perceived to make it less risky to get permanent residency as an EB2 application is believed to be significantly faster than an EB3.
- immigration rules self-select for science and technology staff. Put another way, if you're Chinese or Indian without the $$$ for an investor visa, an H1B as a technical staff member is how you're getting here.
It would be an interesting academic exercise to determine how much our immigration policies affect graduate school composition in the STEM fields.
Yes!!! As a parent who, while taking my D to HS last year, had to drive past several train crossing that have to be guarded 24/7 to keep over-stressed kids from jumping on the tracks, I am very concerned with what is happening in these communities. This is a not a case of “lazy” parents wanting to dumb down the curriculum for their “lazy” children. It’s about wanting to have kids that are challenged in a non-destructive way. It’s easy to say think that it’s ok because “my kid” is doing fine in the system, until you realize how the competition and stress is destroying our kids. I applaud school districts that are trying to change something; maybe they aren’t always going about it in the right way, but they do realize that something is very wrong here.
One of the scary things in the suicide clusters is that the kids who killed themselves had also seemed like they were doing fine.
I also object to a public school system where parents who pay the school more, get more. As I have mentioned many times, parents have to pay extra to enroll their children in AP classes here. (No, I am not talking about paying for the May exams), Then, there are the 700-1000 kids who take prep and advancement courses through our public school district every summer, which enables them to move ahead levels and compensate for what the district acknowledges is inadequate middle school teaching. For example, they offer a summer course for kids going into honors freshman English, for example, to make sure they are ready. Once the schools and teachers start profiting from this system, it will be perpetuated. Our public school teachers also make a killing doing outside tutoring. They take up one entire section of the public library 3-9 every day. Why bother killing yourself to ensure everyone learns, when you can send each other students for pay?
@TheGFG Why don’t you move? Why don’t you run for school board? I am asking this honestly. If I were as unhappy as you are with my school, we would move.
Edited to add: you should not have to move but I would if it were that bad.
The point fretful is not what you chose for your child, but how the overall climate of the school means that everyone that strives to be successful has to follow suit. You seem to think that every non-Asian family in your kid’s school has some huge advantage in legacy admissions or access to the top levels of internships. Just not true. Yes, some do but most of those families are not all that connected. While it may not be dishonest, it is certainly gaming the system to take a class in the summer and take the same or very similar class in the fall for credit at HS.
Schools have to step in when the system becomes so out of balance that a smart, studious, well-prepared kid cannot do well in an AP class without taking a summer course, or going to a cram school.
Nobody is suggesting that the super smart kids be restricted from a challenging curriculum. For every whiz kid like Earl that can learn a semester of law school is a couple of days (according to him), there are many kids in those classes struggling to keep their heads above water and who require a tutor a couple of times per week.
I also can guarantee that many kids that struggle in top STEM APs at WWP, do not struggle nearly as much in engineering classes at a typical college, even Rutgers. Of course, if they struggle there they would not be a good fit for MIT, but so would most students.