The problem in these affluent school districts pales in comparison to the real issue, which is that poorer students have worse public schools. While I’m sympathetic to the overworked kids, that’s not the real travesty IMO.
@"Cardinal Fang “We’ve always had rich people. But we used to have more social mobility. Instead of watching the film at 11, consider what might be the cause of the reduced mobility and whether we ought to try to reverse the trend.”
We have plenty of social mobility now. What has changed is that it is just mostly on the downside. Most of our kids will have less than we did. Part of what drives parents and students to new levels is that they will work harder to keep what they have, than they will to get rich.
@Pizzagirl “The problem in these affluent school districts pales in comparison to the real issue, which is that poorer students have worse public schools. While I’m sympathetic to the overworked kids, that’s not the real travesty IMO.”
Our beaucracy, parental indifference, and self-interested teachers unions combine to prevent this from changing. Until people change how they vote enmasse, this will not change.
@Much2learn - in what way do you hold “self-interested teachers” responsible for inequity in public schools? Unless you mean “self-interested” in the way that every employee is, and deserves to be, i.e. unwilling to put up with horrible working conditions for a low salary when they qualify for a better job elsewhere.
We agree as to the facts, but not as to terminology. Inflation-adjusted median wages are going down, so parents feel that their children have to work harder to achieve the same actual financial situation as their parents. However, the term “social mobility” is generally used as a relative term. It describes movement between income percentiles. It would be impossible, by definition, for social mobility to be only on the downside, since whenever one person moves down from the top income quintile, another takes their place. Somebody has to be in the 1%.
From post #264
Americans? I thought this thread was about New Jersey schools.
Re: definition of “AP lite”
I use that term to mean an AP course where the score is rarely given subject credit, placement into more advanced courses by colleges, or where a year long AP course leads to at most a semester of subject credit, or where the AP course is considered suitable for mainstream honors 9th and 10th grade students.
“It describes movement between income percentiles. It would be impossible, by definition, for social mobility to be only on the downside, since whenever one person moves down from the top income quintile, another takes their place. Somebody has to be in the 1%.”
Wouldn’t that also mean social mobility couldn’t be only on the upside either? What’s the appropriate measure?
Correct. Social mobility can’t be on the upside, or the downside. It’s a measure of mixing.
Social mobility measures how easy it is to move up and down the social scale. One way it’s measured is by the intergenerational income elasticity, a mouthful that describes the fraction of a person’s income class that is explained by one’s parents income class.
In a society with an intergenerational income elasticity of 1, the highest possible value one’s income class is completely dependent on one’s parent’s income class: kings’ children become kings, queens and princes, knights’ children become knights and ladies, peasants’ children become peasants, and there is no chance of anything else. In a society with an intergenerational income elasticity of 0, the lowest possible value, anyone can become anything: hedge fund managers would have children who were CEOs, or teachers, or Walmart workers, or homeless bums, and Walmart workers would have children who were CEOs or teachers or Walmart workers or homeless bums too.
So what is the U.S. score on this and how has it changed over time? Apologies if I’ve missed it.
MaterS, I apologize, but there are no adequate terms to describe national origin and ethnicity. By Asian, I mean students whose parents are recent immigrants, who consider themselves to be Indian, Chinese, Korean etc. rather than American, and whose culture and intense emphasis on educational preparation differs from the mainstream US culture. My children’s high school peers were usually born here, but they did not self-identify as Americans. One reason is that their parents were very fearful of them being negatively influenced by what they perceive to be a corrupt Western culture that produces lazy and ignorant children and warned them against too much association with “Americans.” This directly from the horses’ mouths.
Yes, I have high expectations for all my children, but that does not mean I treat them like my personal property to be molded by me, by selected prep programs, and by unceasing study into some “ideal” student who will win prizes and bring honor to our family. I also have never made my kids kneel on uncooked rice to punish them for getting a bad grade, or shamed them for only getting an A-. As a result, none of them have cut themselves, attempted suicide, or broken into sobs at school when they get back a paper with the wrong letter on it.
Google Asian parent videos for a whole assortment of videos produced by Asian kids about Asian parenting–some serious, some humorous but with some pain underneath. There’s one serious one where the mother says that her daughter’s 770/800 is not too bad, but not too good either, and that she would only give her a hug for an 800. There’s another where a teen girl is truly miserable because her father never lets her go out with her friends, because he says her goal needs to be to get into HYP.
@GFG: Most of us here have not actually pointed out the laser focus on the “Asian” mention again and again, but it has been noted, I imagine, by nearly all.
While you are merely using a familiar idiom in your text above, “directly from the horses’ mouths,” please know that I, at least, find that to be punctuating a speech which has already taken liberties beyond a civility most of here like to think ourselves capable of.
My grandmother would seriously warn against the hubris that has now begun to reek from the final paragraph in #390: we never know what turns life holds in store for us, and it behooves each of us to walk forward carefully and with gratitude that things have gone well on our paths.
Or, as my grandmother would have put it, “There but for the grace of…”
@Pizzagirl I don’t want to sidetrack the thread chatting about Intergenerational Income Mobility, something we could argue about for weeks, but here’s a good link that covers the basics.
http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/intergenerational-income-mobility.aspx
@fretfulmother “@Much2learn - in what way do you hold “self-interested teachers” responsible for inequity in public schools? Unless you mean “self-interested” in the way that every employee is, and deserves to be, i.e. unwilling to put up with horrible working conditions for a low salary when they qualify for a better job elsewhere.”
I see you disingenuously turned an adjective into a noun when you quoted me.
Trying to redirect the ignorant masses by conflating the important and difficult work that good teachers do with the barriers that teacher’s unions have created to improving education for children who need it, is really despicable, in my opinion. It tells me that either you don’t know what you are talking about, you think the other posters don’t know what they are talking about, or both.
This just looks like a hard course, not necessarily one intentionally curved to give student low grades or weed them out (note that Penn’s overall GPA was 3.44 in 2004, so it is a relatively grade-inflated college). There are characteristics of CS courses that are not unique to Penn:
- CS courses with programming are often higher workload than most courses. 30 hours per week is extreme, though not unheard of; the normal workload of a typical college course (4 credits or one of four courses per semester) should be about 12 hours per week on average for a typical student, though CS courses with programming may be slightly higher on average. (Which course is this out of http://www.cis.upenn.edu/about-academics/courses.php ?)
- Computer programming is a task where productivity between different people can vary by an order of magnitude. So some students may be spending far more time than other students on the same programming assignments. (Presumably, the least productive at computer programming were the ones who could not finish the assignments and likely got the low grades in the course because of that.)
- Top end high school academic performance does not necessarily correlate that well to productivity in computer programming.
@ucbalumnus “This just looks like a hard course, not necessarily one intentionally curved to give student low grades or weed them out”
I agree. It was clearly a hard course, and I don’t know the intent. It was also the third course in the main CS sequence, so it was not an intro course. Everyone there is probably at least minoring in the subject. Happily, the students do report their time spent on each course every week, so the instructor and department can evaluate what is happening and why. That is something they do well. I think all schools should do it.
@ucbalumnus “(note that Penn’s overall GPA was 3.44 in 2004, so it is a relatively grade-inflated college).”
I would say it is probably 3.5 overall, but that SEAS is significantly lower. I would guess about 3.2. Not onerously low, but not hyper-inflated, in my opinion. In contrast, this course was about 1/3 As, 1/3 Bs, and 1/3 Cs, Ds, and Fs.
@UCBalumnus “There are characteristics of CS courses that are not unique to Penn:”
No, clearly not unique to Penn. CS tends to be more time consuming. However, I would say that the work expected of these students, and the standards of grading are so high that there are only are a handful of schools where the majority of CS students could manage to hang in there: UCB, Carnegie, Stanford, MIT, other Ivies, Cal Tech. Probably forgot a couple.
@ucbalumnus " Computer programming is a task where productivity between different people can vary by an order of magnitude. So some students may be spending far more time than other students on the same programming assignments. (Presumably, the least productive at computer programming were the ones who could not finish the assignments and likely got the low grades in the course because of that.)"
That may be the case. I am not sure. Hopefully, they can sort that out from the time reporting. It sounds like the vast majority of the class was spending a lot of time on it.
Fortunately, with a monumental effort, DD got through it well from a grade perspective, but a bit emotionally roughed up, which she isn’t used to. I am hoping this term is better.
My point is that the idea that all engineering programs are the same is simply not true. Top programs do expect more from their students.
Is it CIS 121, the data structures course, with weekly mostly-programming assignments and a term project?
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis121/current/homework.html
“Yes, I have high expectations for all my children, but that does not mean I treat them like my personal property to be molded by me, by selected prep programs, and by unceasing study into some “ideal” student who will win prizes and bring honor to our family. I also have never made my kids kneel on uncooked rice to punish them for getting a bad grade, or shamed them for only getting an A-. As a result, none of them have cut themselves, attempted suicide, or broken into sobs at school when they get back a paper with the wrong letter on it.”
Then you’ve “won,” regardless of whether or not they got into Dartmouth / Stanford.
Regarding the equity issues discussed earlier between school districts, the contrast between this district and the district of a kid I corresponded with who is in Atlantic City is striking. He (?) wanted to find a way that his district could offer a single AP Computer Science or some sort of programming class. I looked up the district and found that it had basically gone bankrupt and had been taken over by the state. Sad.
Both New Jersey school districts. I’m curious, does property tax go straight to the district in NJ? Or, are the high-achieving public schools financially supported by local bonds and parcel taxes? I’m in California, so know how CA school district funding works (both pre- and post-LCFF). Charging money for AP classes or other academic services provided by the school district is illegal in CA.