@mathyone “I am also skeptical that an algebra placement test would test actual algebra.”
This depends on your definition. Last year, one parent asked me what math class my 7th grader was in. I said, “algebra.” She replied that her second grader is already doing algebra. lol She is right, but she means that they are already introducing the topic with problems like X +1 = 3. What is the value of X?
Like many other subjects, it can be taught at many levels. What may look the same on the surface, may not really be the same at all.
So how do the parental educational attainment demographics look? I.e. you (and apparently others) are focused on the visible aspects of race and ethnicity, but is it really about the parental educational attainment? Remember, the immigration system has heavily selected immigrants from China and India for high educational attainment, so that is likely the reason for high academic achievement among the kids of such immigrants (regardless of tiger parenting or not).
Well, we’d be hard pressed to tell what would happen apart from tiger parenting since it does indeed occur. Count me among those who couldn’t afford tutoring (years ago it was $90/hr. for AP chem) AND who don’t think regular tutoring summers and weekends should be a necessity for the brightest kids. Agree with Cardinal Fang in 497.
@Cardinal Fang " The question is, do we want the other kid who is equally good as Zinhead’s kid, but whose parents can’t afford tutors, to languish in the lower group-- even though by hypothesis she is capable of succeeding in the advanced group? No."
The parents focused on academics are going to continue to use evenings, weekends, and summer breaks to give their kids an advantage.
If you really want to help the students who have the ability but are getting left behind, you are going to need to expand the school day, significantly shrink the anachronistic summer break, and do a better job with math, English and science instruction. With more instruction for the average kid, and less down time for academic parents and Tiger Parents to give their students an advantage, you will shrink the gap. You will also need to be able to get bad teachers out of the classroom and incentivize the best teachers.
Good luck getting any of that approved. That is why I am resigned that all I can do is help my own kids and the kids of close friends and family.
I expect something slightly more complicated than that would appear on an algebra readiness test. But you don’t need to enroll a kid in algebra for them to learn that material. It’s standard pre-algebra fare and they tippy toe up to these problems for years prior, showing kids letters in equations for years because apparently this is something difficult to understand. What I mean by actual algebra is the material usually covered in the algebra 1 class.
I just looked at the Algebra placement test for the Saxon math series available free on the web. They recommend a score of 85% for success in algebra 1. It contains questions like Solve: 8x–2–x–4x=–3x+14 and Solve:
6/7 divided by 12/21=4/x This kind of thing is covered in pre-algebra. There is also some simple geometry on this placement exam. Doesn’t mean the kids are expected to have already learned geometry. Basics are covered before you get to the high school level.
Extra tutoring is not a necessity to do well in an AP chemistry class and test. Indeed, if they are cramming that much, they are doing it poorly and spending far more time than they should be spending to learn the material. Or the school is not teaching chemistry like it is supposed to (so that school class time is a waste of time and tutoring is needed to make that up).
It should not take more than three or four semesters of normal intensity rigorous high school courses to cover the material in high school chemistry plus AP chemistry. No after-school tutoring or cram school or summer chemistry courses should be needed.
Still not clear on why the community accepts such mundane AP test results after spending a fortune and summers/ weekends tutoring and hyper-prepping the kids. My kid didn’t even buy a test prep review book for all her APs and somehow she managed to get 5s. That includes AP chem, no summer school, no tutor. I think she did get a test prep review book for that one though, she thought it was hard.
“Still not clear on why the community accepts such mundane AP test results after spending a fortune and summers/ weekends tutoring and hyper-prepping the kids. My kid didn’t even buy a test prep review book for all her APs and somehow she managed to get 5s. That includes AP chem, no summer school, no tutor. I think she did get a test prep review book for that one though, she thought it was hard.”
A lot of the problem is the variability of the teaching. Our AP Physics C teacher has decided that the students should learn by reading the book, that he will not lecture, and that during class time, he will only answer questions. Unsurprisingly, AP scores are low for students who don’t get help outside of class, but the teacher has tenure so the administration does nothing about it.
In contrast, they have a great teacher for Calc BC and last year 46 of the 50 students (two classes of 25 each) got a 5. Unfortunately, the school does nothing to reward this teacher for the amazing results he is getting.
Our school does not rank, but the profile reports the weighted GPA by deciles. It is fairly easy to figure out that anything less than a 4.0 (weighted by 0.5 for honors and APs ) is needed for top 10percent.
PG the point some are making is that now even for a school ranked 30, a kid in a WWP has to join the race to get into a tufts or BC. It is no longer possible to be just a good student and be accepted at those sorts of colleges if you are in a hyper-competitive district. Of course life will go on if a kid is only accepted to a school ranked in the 50s but then they probably could have slacked off quite a bit in high school.
I agree with 3girls and CF. It is about parents who can’t afford all the extras. Most parents will engage a tutor if needed to get kid over a rough spot. But in one class for a short period. Many cannot afford to spend $90 per hr per subject every week. Nor the tuition for outside classes. It is also about families that believe that it should be possible to be a very good student and have at least some non-academic experiences on weekends and in the summer and still, with ability and hard work, be at the top of the class. No slacker could do that.
If parents and kids want to pay for academic enrichment, that is their choice. I object to a district teaching a course as if every kid has already covered half the material or sending a subtle message that any kid that doesn’t spend all weekend in a classroom is a slacker. It is not easy for some kids to ignore such a culture, even with parental support.
The kids that are naturally that far ahead are few and far between, even in an affluent district. For those that say APs are easy, there are ways to make a class harder than the traditional AP curriculum by adding material or testing to a minute detail. That doesn’t make it a better learning experience.
I guess I am going to go back to this - why not move? Because of school performance, these districts have very high home values. Why not sell, take your profit and move to a less expensive, less competitive school district? It is a free country after all. If you want limited resources and less competitive peers, that is not all that difficult to find. Your kid can be at the top of the class with very little effort and no APs. They will have a better shot at an elite ( if that is what you are after) coming out of a school where there are less resources. Another variant of the “Is it better to be a big fish in a small pond” question.
In Texas, there was a lot of talk about parents moving to districts where their kids could be in the top ten percent in order to secure auto admission to the state schools. It really turned out to be mostly all talk. Most people (of all ethnicities) want their kids in the best district they can afford. But it is a consideration- if school district A is only slightly less resourced than School District B, the some of the benefits of district A is your kid has a better chance of being in the top of the class, your house is cheaper and your taxes are lower. Are you willing to make those trade- offs? Some people are and some people are not.
I could have lived in New Trier school district, but deliberately avoided it because of the high pressure.
My town is divided between school district A (New Trier-like; my H went there) and school district B (still a “good” suburban school district but not tippy top). H knew what A was like and so we deliberately chose a house in B. Very glad we did.
Interesting. It says "Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. ". My kids see them as cool things they want to do. They both have made some choices that were definitely not their best opportunity to impress colleges. If families want to teach their kids that their life should be conducted to impress colleges, I don’t think there is much a school can do about it.
Yea! Indeed one of my kids in particular pursued interest A when I was telling him - oh gosh you should really pursue interest B for college purposes. He was 100% right and I was 100% wrong.
I think we need to be careful to distinguish between wealth-based opportunities like expensive summer courses or tutoring for struggling students and transparent attempts to game the system.
It is a huge advantage to come from a family at a certain socioeconomic and educational level, but I don’t think we get anywhere by railing against parents for trying to secure the best opportunities for their children. At best, we can try to support programs that attempt to even the score at least a little bit by providing support and enrichment to lower-income students. Anything more would be as fruitless as making a law mandating that educated parents couldn’t read to or speak in front of their children for more than x hours a day lest they obtain an unfair advantage over students whose parents lacked sophisticated vocabularies and a culture of literacy.
That seems qualitatively different than taking AP Chemistry the summer before you’ll be taking it for a grade in high school purely in order to secure a competitive advantage. If you want enrichment, take a summer course on forensic science, or robotics, or something else that isn’t going to be taught to you two months later. Taking a course twice in order to get a better grade on the official transcript may not be cheating, but it does seem academically dishonest to me.
Thinking back to my own school years, because I was an early reader, there were books on the high school curriculum that I had read well before encountering them in a course. Certainly, the fact that I had done so was, on some level, an unearned advantage – my father was a high school English teacher; if he hadn’t been, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to read Pride and Prejudice in 5th grade, no matter how capable I was. He did not, however, sit me down the summer I was 16 and formally “teach” me the greatest hits of 11th grade English so that I’d have sparkling insights on Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter come September. If anything, I was scrupulously careful not to discuss works I was reading in school with my father in any depth in order to avoid anything that could be construed as dishonesty.
"That seems qualitatively different than taking AP Chemistry the summer before you’ll be taking it for a grade in high school purely in order to secure a competitive advantage. " Agreed. But I am wondering whether the colleges are being fooled by this. The kids list summer activities, and if I saw a kid taking summer classes and then taking the same classes in school, it’s obvious what is going on. Circular file.
Do students list tutoring, cram schools, or remedial summer work on their applications?
I imagine that if they have taken a summer class at the high school, it will be listed on their transcript, and that they will list any enrichment classes as well.
Here’s an idea. Suppose, for the sake of argument, all the “crammed”/overpushed kids wind up at the Ivies. What harm is done? Are there special opportunities at the Ivies that are not available elsewhere? Give me a break.
(Cue the inevitable, stupid “but if you want to be an I-banker” … Let’s actually live in reality, where I-banking is just another job, not the meaning of life or the definition of success.)
What happens to the value of an Ivy degree as the student body skews more to crammed/over prepped kids? Stands to reason it would go down, since the world of work doesn’t really value so-called soulless, programmed drones.
They are not taking AP Chem in summer school. They are taking a Chemistry enrichment class. Some people would call that a passion for chemistry and some schools will see it as such. Some would call it cramming.
The issue is that the AP Chem teacher is not teaching part of the AP Chem curriculum because so many took the enrichment class. That is the problem- diverging from the AP curriculum which a few posters have implied is somewhat rigid from a teacher’s perspective. To some a teacher is exploring the material in greater depth and to some they are not teaching the curriculum appropriately.