It’s so interesting. When the USA had the finest school system in the world kids went to school together, they came home had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, then went out to play until it was dark, then did a little homework and went to bed. Everyone played sports and the prom was just as important as anything going on in school. When it came time for college you took the SAT once or twice and you applied to about 3 - 5 schools and you interviewed. There was little stress in the process and in the end most kids went to where they were always intended to go.
Our greatest generations were educated all together without all the modern day nonsense and special courses for the “gifted”.
We find ourselves running in place to achieve very little IMO.
Luckily at my local high school, only the top 10% of the kids play this insane game of keeping up with the academic Jones. The rest of the student body think they’re crazy and ignore the race. So, the good but not stellar student survives high school nicely without cram school, pre-taking courses over the summer and stressing over the number of AP classes. I doubt must students care about their class rank beyond a certain point.
One mother told me when D first enrolled as a ninth grader, she was “behind” in math because she wasn’t on track to take Calc BC as a junior. I told the mom, my child was fine. Maybe within that top 10% cohort, my child was “behind” but I couldn’t get to excited about it. I focused on her education, not grades or how she compared to others. In the end, her child failed the AP BC exam junior year and had to retake it senior year. My child took Calc BC her senior year, took the AP exam that same year. Both kids received the same scores.
During senior year, when kids were applying to colleges, it became very clear that those not striving for top colleges were far less stressed. Many applied EA to a place outside the top 35, 45, got in and were done.
(To be clear, I’m Asian and that mom is white. So Asian parents and students also opt out of the race too)
@naviance, Wow. Years of cram schools, private tutoring, and screening tests to keep kids who haven’t already mastered the material out of the AP classes… and your school results are only 5-10% better than ours where interested B students are allowed in and you would be considered crazy to “pretake” the class. Not impressed at all.
This kind of arms race thinking is dangerous. It doesn’t evaporate once kids enter their college years and I worry that it has the power to limit academic growth at the precise time when trying new and unfamiliar things should be at its height.
Instead what I see are children and parents who continue to be focused on the resume and focused on the grades. The GPA continues to be the central concern and one of my friends keeps tabs on every single exam and paper, noting the grade to the hundredths place to the right of the decimal point and worrying whether that will affect the 4.0. (And no, she isn’t Asian.) I see the tendency in my own daughter who reported first semester grades to us gleefully, even though the classes themselves were somewhat disappointing. And this is after we talked long and hard about the unique opportunities college learning offers and that in order to benefit from it, you need to move from that competitive, A or bust mindset to an openminded, “learner’s mind” perspective. I’m not advocating complete obliviousness nor am I anti-achievement. I also realize that those who are med school hopefuls have no choice but to fret over the GPA. I just think the competitive pressure and the continuous ramping up of standards and expectations is harmful and comes at great cost to all.
When the Greatest Generation raised their kids in the 50’s, the “competition” in europe & asia was still picking up from the ashes post-war. There was no real competition within the US. Minorities weren’t admitted into the same colleges as whites. And a white man w/o a college degree could still comfortably support a family on a factory wage.
Our generation and earlier generations were definitely NOT educated together. We were in racially segregated schools. I was one of the kids caught up in a US urban desegregation program in the 70s. I was attending the nearby elementary school (a 5 min walk away), and reassigned to another elementary school a mile away where I became the only non-black kid in my class. Today, public schools have pretty much gone back to being racially segregated.
I live/work overseas in different countries, and I see what the REAL competition is now-- it’s not just the other kids in US suburbia. If some American parents want their kids to come home after class hours to a grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup & playtime till dark, then nothing is stopping them.
@GMTplus7 You don’t get the point, and you probably won’t. Really successful adults no matter what career are not raised like robots like what is going in West Windsor. I know it well. I went to a school in Monmouth County that was seeded by the kids of Bell Labs engineers. It was a great school where body, heart and mind were cultivated. The demographics changed and the school is so culturally vapid the “better” SAT scores could never compensate.
After 25 years of working with kids from college through careers in finance, rarely if ever does the West Windsor profile succeed. It requires a lot more skill not taught by “advanced” courses.
The USA should not raise kids along the Asian model. It is a naturally limited education model that is dependent on the liberal arts model, which leads it.
We need to get back to roots in education, not destroy our children. I personally believe all AP classes should be eliminated. All kids in public school should be in class together.
The US is FAR from raising the kids along the Asian model. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not grades & GPA alone that get the kids into the most elite American colleges.
I have no issues w getting rid of AP classes. My kids’ selective private HSs don’t even offer them. I do, however, have an issue w arbitrarily putting kids together in the same class by age. They should be grouped by ability. My kids’ schools put academically capable freshmen in the same class w juniors & seniors.
In the same way athletically capable students are stretched athletically to further develop their potential, intellectually capable students should be stretched intellectually, Capable students w/o financial means shouldn’t have their intellectual ability dumbed down in public schools which you want teaching down to the lowest common denominator.
“I personally believe all AP classes should be eliminated. All kids in public school should be in class together.” That’s a popular viewpoint among parents whose kids aren’t suffering from extreme boredom in school.
I loved the “right to squeak” decree that kids in 4th/5th grade will no longer be “counseled out” of orchestra or band because they don’t yet play their instrument at a proficient enough level.
We had a lot of challenges at middle school with parents who were strongly insistent that their kid who had done Suzuki since age 3 shouldn’t have to play in an orchestra with kids who’d just started violin in 5th grade.
I do wish all high schools required teachers to provide homework at least a week in advance. In many ways, it wasn’t the quantity that was a problem, but the timing and lack of notice. More thoughtful homework assignments would have also greatly reduced the time required. Videos are very time consuming, and annotating and tabbing – for multiple concepts – a four hundred page novel is a huge time sink, especially when you’re graded based on having annotations on virtually every page.
Limiting the number of AP classes per term would seem to handle a number of issues.
I despised these types of assignments. I still rarely write in books and rather take notes in a notebook.
Everyone learns differently and requiring students to annotate like that generally just makes them skim and make random notes on every page to fulfill the checkmark.
I want homework reform before restricting the number of AP courses or anything like that. Students should take the curriculum that best fits their needs.
I don’t even know what this statement means (“it” pronoun reference is unclear). The “Asian model” (hyperspecialization, concern for earnings potential/prestige, focus on quantitative evaluation) would seem to be the antithesis of the “find yourself, learning for learning’s sake” American liberal arts model. Can you elaborate?
RE Monmouth County: Holmdel is a lot like West Windsor IMHO. Many parents are upset about the supercompetitiveness of it all. New Jersey is a high school pressure cooker.
" parents who were strongly insistent that their kid who had done Suzuki since age 3 shouldn’t have to play in an orchestra with kids who’d just started violin in 5th grade." They don’t have to. They can join the chorus or band.
Restricting access to APs is not a solution to this problem. It really hurts the kids who are ready for the material and want to learn it. Do you honestly believe that the parents who push their kids into cram schools and tutoring starting in elementary school will be in any way deterred by limits on AP classes? They will send their kids to cc or online or private schools. Those poor kids still will be crushed under unreasonable parental expectations and the kids who just want to attend their local public school and take challenging appropriate classes will be unnecessarily held back. My kids like their AP classes. If some families are approaching child abuse with expectations that are dangerous to their kids’ mental health, then those families need to be educated. Taking away opportunities from other people’s kids is not the answer.
@TurnerT --I also went to a Monmouth County school seeded with Bell Labs families. What I liked about our high school was that is was so huge, you went to school with everyone, from Bell Labs families and doctors’ kids, to the local fisherman’s kids.
We avoided the whole arms race by not raising our kids in a “good” school system. Very diverse in every way, including racially, economically, and aspirationally. Somehow both ended up educated, and went to very good colleges (a top LAC and an Ivy), where they held their own academically.
I think they would have been destroyed by the kind of school system this article and some of the posters here describe.
@garland Hmmmm well mine wasn’t big, perhaps you went to MS or MN? I went to HHS.
The current high school system in NJ despite high rankings fails the vast majority of kids. Parents and kids are played by the system because the end result is just “good” standardized test scores not competence. Teachers and administrators are rewarded on this basis.
It would be to everyone’s benefit if High School was not designed as preparation for college, rather preparation for life.
well, since it is old home week i’ll play…I graduated from the neighboring district where I was a minority based on religion, and was also one of the top in the state at the time :-). I distinctly remember honors level classes but I honestly don’t think there was any such thing as AP’s…I recall having to move on to the CC if you completed a course sequence. but my memory could be fuzzy.
I hate the state of education today. imo, we aren’t churning out smarter kids, just better trained ones for the sake of a rank or a test score. I, for one, do not think kid A who aced Calc B/C by the time they are freshmen is smarter than my kid who took Alg1. I also don’t particularly think these 6.0 GPA’rs and long resumes of building yerts in Ghana while playing the violin and running a 3 min mile are any better than my kid…one who prefers to whittle the time surfing the net. while I do believe there are some kids that need enrichment to this level and are gifted, I do NOT believe there are so many of them…and I think many will be in for a rude awakening once they are in the real world.
i’m not a fan of race…it seems to me that there are as many dolts that barely graduate from HS who are as happy and as (sometimes more) successful as the counterparts who are trained like monkeys.
@NJSue The Asian model of education is one of task mastery and measurement, not educational enrichment.
Monmouth County parents are mad about a lot of things, including the county magnet schools for the Ultra Snowflakes. The anger is not about competitiveness and achievement, it is about the marginalization of the social experience of these four precious years and the segmentation of students. Segmentation is the wrong word, rather isolation and sequester.
I went to MTHS, graduating the year before it split into N and S.