It definitely had some value. If you recall, I offered it as an example of ways that AP classes can go above and beyond in difficulty and time expenditure without necessarily impacting performance on the May exam or even really helping the kids all that much because they aren’t truly prepared to do that sort of work at their age and educational level.
D has been submitting 4-7 pages double-spaced every English class. Call that one short paper, one long essay, two short essays, whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. Would someone like to see last night’s assignment? I don’t really consider that to be excessive. I only mentioned the amount to show that it’s a good bit more than what kids in other schools have to do for AP, eg. 3 papers all year.
Haven’t the parents met with the principal and asked to have the AP teachers instructed to teach the entire AP curriculum and not add in a lot of assignments that may have value but are not appropriate to the course’s scope and level? Seems like this would go a long way toward relieving student stress.
Haven’t they asked that school policy be that courses taken over the summer replace those taken during the school year–no pre-taking classes–and that the summer school be limited to serving students who need those courses in the regular catalog, not extra “enrichment” designed to teach part of the curriculum and turn the school year into a 12 months school?
What has the response from administration been?
My kids attended public schools. The school district has a homework policy limiting the amount of homework. That reduced alot of stress. In one of the AP classes the teacher said at the beginning of the class that he didnt teach or prepare the kids for for the AP exam . It was a great class and the kids learned a lot. At the end of their senior year a lot of kids dont take AP exams because as they say there is no point to it since they have already gotten into college.
I think alot of the posters make really good points. It is about creating a healthier environment for the kids
@3girls3cats - I am not discounting your experience, but it is not the experience that I have had. It is human nature for people to be competitive. For some people it means buying a fancy car, for others it means sticking a Harvard sticker on a ten year old Honda. Your school attracts an inordinate number of people who want the Harvard sticker.
Our public high school has a mean SAT score of around 1820 so it is relatively competitive. The parents are mostly white collar first generation upper middle class, so they are part of the subset of parents that want to push their kids educationally. The school has good placement, and while there is stress and lots of homework for the 5 AP/Honors kids, AFAIK there have been no suicides (and we live along a train line). The high achieving kids mostly get along with each other, and it is no negative environment from our perspective. At the same time, we do have a vocal minority of parents who want to de-emphasize academics.
Despite the good reputation of the district, there are a number of parents in the district who send their kids to parochial school. The reasoning varies, but it mostly revolves around keeping their kids out of what they perceive as a high stress school. At the same time, we know other parents in surrounding public school districts that are not as strong academically as ours who send their kids to these same parochial schools because they want a more strenuous learning environment.
The point I am trying to make is that these parents are doing what they think is in the best interest of their child, as are the hyper parents in your district. You, as a non-hyper parent (I don’t mean that as an insult) don’t want to compete in this rat race (and I might feel the same way if I were in your shoes), but nobody should restrict other parents from doing what they believe is in the best interest of their children. If it means establishing a foundation and then creating research opportunities for the child, let them do it. We had a father fund a private club for an obscure team sport so his three daughters could get recruited to HYPSM, and it worked!
But once we start imposing restrictions on out of school activities, or tutoring, or private research foundations, or OOS sports clubs, we also open the box to a variety of other restrictions on parents and students rights, and that is someplace we should not be going as a country. Earlier in the thread, a poster suggested several solutions to this problem, and they involved moving your child out of the district, or “running your own race” by emphasizing a less competitive academic track. IMHO, those are the options I would be pursuing, rather than trying to change or control the behavior of other people.
As far as a district response, they just instituted a rule that high school students can only use an outside educational option to advance in level 3 times. This will not affect what happens before high school, though. So for three summers the child could take a math class to move up a level for the next year, but that’s it. He couldn’t also take several science classes and move up levels for science too.
As for homework, the BOE response was “then don’t take the class.”
In some academic environments such as the academically competitive STEM-centered public magnet I attended, some Ivy/elite universities, or some professional environments I’ve worked in, being labeled a “hard worker” is considered a backhanded compliment.
This is because it implies the one being labeled is a plodder lacking much intellect, creative imagination, or leadership acumen. Not something most students/employees drawn to such environments wanted to be known for…
- Summer/Grad.
This idea of “placing limits” on homework or academic leveling would have been considered a form of “Harrison Bergeroning” by most HS classmates and their parents at my STEM-centered public magnet and a major reason why they opted to apply for and attend our HS once admitted. I don’t think that will do more than hurt the students who actually desire/need the challenge…such as students who fit the profiles of most of my HS classmates.
While there have been a tiny minority of parents like the one I met who decried what can sometimes be an admittedly high pressure cooker cutthroat academic environment, the prevailing attitude from most classmates/parents when I attended and even now is “If the student/parent feels it’s too much, they have the option of transferring back to their zoned/neighborhood high school”.
However, that’s quite different from the situation presented in the OP as there’s a much more of an affirmative choice exercised in applying for and attending a public magnet HS like the one I attended versus being in a situation where the only alternatives are to push for reforms or move out of a highly competitive/stressful public school district altogether.
An entire school district’s mission is to serve all students at every academic level, not only for those at the very top. If all the K-12 schools are only serving the needs of the very top, very bottom, or the middle 50% to the exclusion of others, there’s a serious policy issue that needs to be examined.
Also, if a student has taken an advanced course in the summer, he/she should NOT be catered to if he/she opts to repeat the same/similar course in the regular school year UNLESS his/her academic performance in the next higher level course in the sequence is woefully lacking(C- or worse). If one doesn’t want to sit through “repeats” of “old material”, one should opt to take more advanced courses…and the school district should freely facilitate this.
Some consideration* could also be given to a policy my HS used for students who wanted to take more than 4-5 APs in a given year which required special academic approval from the higher admins to try getting the student/parent to carefully consider the implications of taking this step. A contract with a warning had to be signed in which the student states he/she has read and understood that if he/she finds taking the extra AP course(s) is too much for him/her, he/she cannot drop down to an easier course or drop the extra AP(s) altogether…but must see them through to the end.
It could be modified to apply to students who take summer courses to be at a greater advantage by trying to take the same course in the school year…except school policies should be geared towards bumping the student in question to the next higher level course in the sequence rather than keeping them in the course.
- With some personal reservations.
Illinois has a public Math and Science Academy that draws kids from around the state. The average ACT is 32.2, and it is 41% Asian. College placement is excellent although it is heavily skewed towards STEM schools. It may be that IMSA draws many of the “hyper” parented kids that would otherwise be in the better public schools.
https://www.imsa.edu/sites/default/files/upload/cac_profile_2015-final.pdf
If it was anything like the prevailing atmosphere at the NYC Specialized HS when I attended, the vast majority of motivation and drive was much more student rather than parent driven.
Part of this was due to many immigrant parents not having enough language skills and/or educational background* to navigate the school bureaucracy or the academic material being presented. This made the academic performance and college admission/post-college accomplishments much more impressive. Efspecially considering quite a few of them were genuine geniuses** who didn’t have to stay up till 1-2 am like I or other academic laggards needed to keep our heads above academic water or the AP kids who needed to stay up till 3-4 to keep up with those geniuses.
- Many classmates' parents were middle school or sometimes even elementary school dropouts back in their home countries who worked waiting tables in restaurants or working as laborers/seamstresses in factories/workshops. Not the highly educated immigrants with college or higher level educations UCBalumnus often references.
** One friend who was the salutatorian of my graduating class had no issues completing 4 years at MIT near the top of his graduating class with an MS and a BS in EE while maintaining a bedtime of 11 pm each night even during final exam periods***.
*** I happened to be visiting him during finals week after I was done with mine one year and we hung out in his dorm before he politely asked me to leave at 10:30 pm so he can start preparing for bed. All his roommates who roomed with him for a year or two up to that point were astounded at how he was able to consistently maintain a bedtime of 11 pm and wake up at 7 am and still manage to get far more stuff done in a day than they could in a few.
Regarding IMSA - perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that there are two other public “lab” magnet schools in Illinois, University High School of Urbana and the one in Chicago which I believe is colloquially “the Lab School” but maybe a native could correct me if that’s not what they go by. So if @Zinhead is correct, the effect could even be triple what he infers.
Marching to the beat of your own drummer works well for EC’s if the student’s activities are not school-dependent, or if they are volunteer-based. Sorry, but slow or unskilled “marching” is going to eliminate you from even making it onto the sports team/academic team/musical ensemble/cast/portfolio exhibition or whatever else at one of the crazy high schools. Marching to the beat of your own drummer curriculum-wise is also going to mean you aren’t even getting into the college prep or honors classes, much less any AP’s at a pressure-filled high school. That may be fine for some, but for others the price might be too steep.
The Chicago Lab school is owned and operated by the University of Chicago. It is a private school with fees of about $30,000 per annum. Many of its students at the children of UC employees.
University High School is a lab school operated by UIUC. Although public, it generally just serves the Urbana/Champaign area, and the many employees of UIUC.
The City of Chicago operates numerous public magnet high schools, four of which, Whitney Young, Northside College Prep, Walter Payton and Jones College Prep, are considered to be the best. However, none of these schools are as competitive as that described by @TheGFG or @3girls3cats although the average ACT scores at IMSA, University High and UC Lab are in the 32 range, or comparable to Palto Alto or WWP. Maybe it is a Midwest nice thing, or maybe people here don’t have enough excess income to throw at high school education.
What classes does someone who can’t even get into college prep classes take?
They take things like “Chemistry in the Community.”
Gotcha. Just like the Pre-med students take Physics for Poets in college.
Pre-meds in college generally have to take physics and other science courses for biology majors at least, though they typically avoid physics for physics majors, etc. (unless they actually are physics majors).
Update: I just had a long conversation with a school administrator about some of the problems discussed in this thread. The reason for the call was a brand new science department policy that is just brutal, so related issues were raised. In short, the supervisor (for the record, she’s Asian) said she sees all the same problems with her own high school son (e.g. stress and sleep deprivation) in another district and “hates what it is doing to him.” She said that from what she can see based on his circle of friends, the kids who are succeeding are all being extensively tutored outside school. Further, she regularly has parents in her office talking about the peer pressure to take the advanced classes, as well as how extremely difficult they are in our district. However, she told me that the stress from excessive homework and the resulting need for outside tutoring is not just a local issue. It’s happening across the country. For that reason, she claimed to be powerless to do anything significant about it at our school.
@thegfg it does not happen everywhere. It did not happen in my kids school. You should take it up with the school board. If they are elected as they are in my district they listen Very carefully. Their public meetings sometimes go on for hours long into the nite!!!
Re #656
What was the new science department policy?
No way high school chemistry + AP chemistry should be as much work or difficulty as you describe. Looks like work for work sake.
There was a group of parents who raised concerns with our school board last year. When they saw no change, they came back this year and complained again. No sign of a response.
The new policy is in response to the fact that supposedly they are spending too much on lab supplies and “expensive chemicals.” So now the AP science kids have to take a pre-lab quiz, which is a timed computer-delivered test right before the lab. Supposedly, this is designed to prevent waste by kids making mistakes. If they fail, then they are not permitted to do the lab that day and must sit idle for the whole period while their classmates do it. Of course, then they have to come one day after school the following week on a day that is convenient for the teacher to make it up. There were two such quizzes this week on back to back days in D’s AP Bio, and some kids failed both. (My D knew most of the material but was not quick enough. She was timed out by the computer before she could finish).
So now the message to students is: “You cannot make a mistake.” For some kids, this is their first real lab class. Of course they are going to make mistakes and have to repeat trials. The kids that fail the quiz are humiliated in front of their classmates and essentially wear a dunce cap for 90 minutes. I have a lot of opinions about this, but am pretty exhausted after phone calls and e-mails about it. I offered to pay extra for any “waste” my dunce might cause so that she be permitted to do the lab. I also asked how it is that so many top students are unprepared to do the lab properly, and shouldn’t the teacher’s pre-lab instruction (there isn’t any) be questioned. I said a lot more too, and it wasn’t pretty.