@TheGFG, I appreciate that you have been willing to speak with such grace and candor throughout this thread. I am sure you have educated many who have been reading along.
you seem to assume students who are twice exceptional (dyslexic high IQ, for instance) don’t exist… The whole point of an IEP is that it levels the playing field for smart kids with a disability. Kids with disabilities have more obstacles than others, it doesn’t mean they’re less smart, and extra time doesn’t necessarily offset that but at least gives them a chance to show what they know and what they can do.
Students get accomodations when they take the SAT, the ACT, etc. because it’s fair.
Another issue with the “prelab” problem is that the possibility of extra time for accomodation wasn’t even factored in. (There’s a lawsuit in the making, because de facto it excludes kids with disabilities.)
“YES it is fair to give more time to students that need it.”
‘Because I said so’ isn’t usually convincing. Let me try…@PickOne1 - a reasonable analogy is if you have a student whose first language is not English. It can be a reasonable accommodation to have a translation dictionary of technical terms on a science test, because the person’s science knowledge is not being tested if the English is a barrier. Special needs children have analogous barriers of various sorts. Some are more or less accommodated with extra time (it’s not an exact science in that way). Some, like my son, are accommodated with special writing instruments to account for muscle weakness.
"Another issue with the “prelab” problem is that the possibility of extra time for accomodation wasn’t even factored in. (There’s a lawsuit in the making, because de facto it excludes kids with disabilities.) "
@MYOS1634 - we don’t actually know this; I was trying to find out if it was what happened.
Also, 2E kids face more hurdles than you may realize in this context, because the case law does not in fact guarantee that they can take any AP/Honors course, but rather can access a “fair and appropriate public education” to make “adequate yearly progress” which may not necessarily include advanced opportunities if those are excluded by their ability as determined by the school.
For example, a kid with a math disability would not necessarily receive accommodations to manage AP Calculus but they have to have a math class. A kid with a severe speech impediment might not be able to take Advanced Acting, but they have to have an arts elective that they can access. Extended time is complex in this context as well, and the case law has not always been clear. - though extended time is administered for kids with it on their IEPs, on AP exams.
ETA: APs are administered by the child’s school, but I don’t know the exact process for the IEP to be accommodated in terms of permissions or whether the application process for that is like it is for the SAT/ACT. (For the SAT/ACT, it is not as simple as having an IEP; they make the bar higher to get extended time.)
p.s. It’s important to note that in the olden days, every science class was also an assessment of English language and neurotypicality and other kinds of “normalcy”. Legally and culturally in the USA, that is no longer considered fair.
However, we still have open questions. Suppose when my son gets older, his challenges mean that he can’t hold glassware firmly (I hope this does not happen!). Would he be entitled to take Chemistry? I don’t think the answer is clear, and it would depend on what accommodations exist in his school. My take, however, is that what my own child can do, should not limit someone else’s child’s options.
That’s the whole problem with AP Sumptuary Laws as discussed earlier. (And no, I don’t accept that disappointed parents with kids who can’t hack it, must be protected from a theoretical problem with the school culture because other people’s kids work harder and achieve more.)
To go back to the issue raised by PickOne1:
“I am somehow really confused by talk that fairness somehow involves people not being able to hire tutors or take summer classes or take MIT openware courses (and if MIT is OK, so is summer school) or heck buying a chemistry for dummies book.”
I think it is fair to do any or all of those things, although it is useful to be mindful that there are families who cannot afford the options that cost money.
The issue of unfairness arises when students take summer classes or Saturday classes, and then the public school takes the knowledge gained in that way as the starting point for the public school classes. The public school classes, even the APs, should require only the earlier public school classes as their pre-requisites.
Multiple scenarios are possible with summer school classes. For example, suppose that students in a particular high school normally take some version of college-prep or honors chemistry for a full year, before taking AP Chem for a full year. (This happens in some places, including our local school.)
If a student wants more challenge, and opts to take the first year of high school chemistry through a distance-learning program or an on-site program such as those offered through the Talent Searches, or via independent study or tutoring, and then proceeds directly into AP Chem, I think that’s fine.
If the student takes the summer chem course to prepare for the first-year high school chem course, and is repeating the same material with no indication that the course is a “repeat,” I think that’s dubious. I really think the high school should mark the academic year course as a “repeat” on the transcript of that student, in that case.
If a large number of students take a summer chem course to prepare for the first-year high school chem course, and then the first-year high school chem course is taught assuming that all of the students have the background acquired through the summer course, I think that’s wrong.
In my opinion, all of the above is also true if the summer course is AP Chem, rather than first-year chem.
I think that highly selective universities should ask about all of the educational experiences their applicants have had, including organized coursework outside of the high-school and tutoring, with a specification of the nature and time spent.
Wow! I just have to ask why you are so defensive? As a teacher, what are you guilty about? As a parent, what have you done? You continue to sling around unfounded accusations, which are largely directed to me. Disappointed parents? Kids who can’t hack it? “Theoretical problem”? D was accepted to Harvard and Stanford, and S to Dartmouth and Cornell. No disappointment, no kids who can’t hack it. D2 may struggle more, but she is doing well overall, and is doing miraculously well given her background. She’s hacking it, and was on the high honor roll last year and hopes to be back up there again by the end of the term.
You seem unable to accept that school issues can be legitimate and unrelated to parental pathology.
@TheGFG - I’m not sure where you’re going with this.
You had some conflicts with your kids’ school, and the teachers, administration, and BoE in your real life more or less decided against what you had hoped. You came to CC to discuss, and not every stranger on the internet agrees with your side of things. Some also ask for clarifying detail of surprising or implausible recollections.
If you want, call me “dismissive” - but I don’t see “defensive”. I’m entitled to interpret the stories according to my own observations and experience as well.
TheGFG, I suspect that one has to have “lived it” to understand.
QMP’s high school experience was much closer to the experience of your two daughters and son than to my own high school experience. Some of the specific issues that you have raised did not arise, but quite analogous issues did arise, and some arose in exactly the form that you have mentioned.
My high school was absolutely excellent (I will not claim that it was perfect.) I would never have imagined the types of problems your daughters and son have encountered, based on my own experience.
If other posters’ local high schools are more like my old high school (from a very long time ago), they probably just can’t imagine it either–even if they are empathetic.
[Note: Cross-posted with fretfulmother, and not directed at the comments in #766.]
I, too, have lived it and get it.
The fact there are excellent teachers, like fretfulmom, doesn’t mean there are less than excellent teachers.
The first grade teacher telling me she couldn’t explain how to teach reading because her students entered first grade knowing how to read, was not an excellent teacher. I had asked her the difference between whole language and phonics approaches and what her experiences had been with each. She told me she never really taught reading because the children knew how already, although first grade was when and where they were “supposed” to be taught reading. This was because “most” had been taught by their parents. Those without the sort of parents who teach early reading skills are disadvantaged from the get go in that situation. Same thing with math. And if the teacher can’t/ won’t catch them up, there isn’t much hope for them. imho.
And this doesn’t necessarily mean those parents thought “let me teach my kids to read so they will be ahead of everyone else.” More likely, it is just the natural result of a child sitting in your lap, asking questions about words while you read a story. Some kids just come from very enriched backgrounds. Families play math games for fun. Others don’t. When public schools teach to the advantaged, those least able to afford it will be further disadvantaged.
I think public schools providing resources for accelerated students can be a good thing. When it further disadvantages those who are already behind, I can’t support it. And I say that as a mom whose kids were in all the gifted programs, which were never really as useful to them as the outside resources I arranged for them myself. But my kids had access to almost unlimited resources outside of school. They were lucky.
We are all going to provide the best resources we can for our kids. It will never be fair. It is not a level playing field. I have no earthly idea what the answer is to this problem. But at least we can acknowledge there is a problem. imho.
And of course, when the excellent teachers having to cope with not only unpleasant working conditions, and low salaries, but also unjust parental criticism, finally decide to just throw in the towel… that hurts all of society. imho.
- doesn’t mean there aren’t less than excellent teachers.*
I have had some difficulty following this thread because I can believe contradictory ideas:
Some students come from enriched backgrounds where acceleration is a natural consequence of family life and they end up the top achievers.
Some students come from not-so-enriched backgrounds and are pushed to compete with others from those enriched backgrounds and end up the top achievers.
Some students do not have the natural talents to compete with the top achievers
Some students might have the natural talent to compete with the top achievers, but haven’t had access to necessary resources because they don’t come from enriched backgrounds and haven’t been pushed.
Some students might have the natural talent to compete with the top achievers, but their parents didn’t know they could provide additional instruction from outside resources, or chose not to do so for very good reasons. They wouldn’t have needed pushing, just appropriate instruction.
It isn’t fair for those with above average ability to be held back
It isn’t fair for those with average ability to have to compete with those of above average ability
It isn’t fair that all families can’t afford the same level of outside help/tutoring for their kids.
It isn’t fair some parents can serve as tutors and some can’t.
Some schools have too much busy work and students trying to to accomplish it, regardless of ability level, are stressed and sleep deprived.
Some schools do not have busy work and students, regardless of ability level, have time to finish their assignments and get enough sleep.
Late bloomers are penalized.
Some AP classes are well run
Some AP classes are a joke.
In the joke AP classes, some students will earn 5s, because of outside self study
Some students will be disadvantaged if they aren’t allowed to accelerate.
Some students will be disadvantaged if they are expected to accelerate.
When I use the word “disadvantaged” I don’t mean with regard to college admissions. I am just thinking about their overall intellectual development. In some cases, providing high achieving students with appropriate resources for their intellectual development will have the side effect of disadvantaging other students at their high school in college admissions. The disadvantaged students would have been stellar college candidates in a different environment.
The college arms race exists and I have no idea what to do in the sort of circumstances described in the OP article. Even if we say “just opt out because that is best of your kid” it doesn’t address the issue of damage to all our kids. It’s a problem without a solution as far as I can tell, but I’m not as smart as the rest of you.
Great list alh. I have a couple to add.
Some kids do not have the natural talent to compete with top achievers, but are tutored/pushed to the limit in order to join that group.
Some kids who have the natural talent to be top achievers and are top achievers feel very stressed out due to the level of pressure, interenal, parental, teacher, and peer, put on them to be almost prefect.
Many students will be disadvantaged is forced to accelerate, but some will bloom.
Bringing the overall level of stress down in a district does NOT mean dumbing down. No kid is going to be hopelessly bored in a good high school if they are made to take a free period or 10 instead of 12 APs. In the kind of high pressure high schools we are talking about here, there are plenty of clubs, service organizations, outside research and other things to do. I don’t necessary think spending 16 hours per day on book work, either in school or studying at home, is good for anyone, no matter how much they love to learn.
I am a strong proponent of gifted education. I believe we do a disservice to our brightest kids if we don’t meet their needs. I believe that is much more of a problem in the early and middle grades, or in low performing high schools, than it is in places like WWP or similar districts. However, even the most gifted kid needs down time, friend time, veg out time, and family time. High school should be challenging and somewhat stressful. It should not, IMHO, be a pressure cooker requiring even the best and brightest to spend 16 hours a day working. And yes, we know there are those with the rare child that breezes through even a WWP curriculum doing only 20 minutes of studying for any and all tests. Can you see, however, how that might be an aberration and that most kids are not? If the kid only has to study for 15 minutes instead of 20, would it really make school measurably easier?
I don’t think this is an easily solvable problem. But I think schools should try to bring down the pressure, without lowering the bar on the quality of instruction. I believe schools can do this and still have great admissions results. But it is very difficult if most won’t acknowledge there even is a theoretical breaking point.
I have question for you all. How many hours does each of your typical high school classes meet in a two week period? What about your AP science courses, like bio and chem? I just found out that our high school AP Bio class meets 70 more hours per year than at my friend’s school. Our school day is longer, so we go to school the equivalent of an extra 2 weeks within the same 180 days. Depending on what is being done with the extra time, a difference like that could make one high school course either a bit easier or a bit harder than at a different high school. You would think our courses would be easier. However, it seems one big difference is our kids do a whole lot more labs (and pre-lab prep and lab reports) than they do. AP’s should be nationally standardized. And then there are the schools that subsume biology 1 and chem 1 into their AP’s, while others don’t.
" No kid is going to be hopelessly bored in a good high school if they are made to take a free period or 10 instead of 12 APs." Have to disagree. My kids would be hopelessly bored if they were forced to take regular English instead of AP or regular history instead of AP. How can you assert otherwise?
And my kids would be upset if they were made to take a free period. It happened in our district that some parents wanted to make study halls mandatory instead of optional. If this policy had passed, my daughter would have dropped out of chorus, which she enjoyed a lot and found to be a great stress-reliever. I was so angry that other parents wanted their kids to have a study hall and therefore wanted my kid to have to drop chorus because they didn’t want their kids to look bad in comparison to my kid.
@mathyone I totally agree. There should not be a reduction of even one class for one of my Honors students who is thriving, for a reason like “someone else’s parents are resentful”.
Budget? Ok. Need the resources for underprivileged kids? Ok. Financial one-percenters feel like their kid is falling behind? No way.
Like you @TheGFG , we are on a modified block schedule with more school hours than required. (725 to 3). Lab classes meet six 80-minute blocks per two weeks.
Since you’re math, mathyone, you’ll realize that your little snowflakes will be in the hated “regular history” and “regular English” with all the other little snowflakes that now aren’t allowed in AP History. And that class can be equally interesting as AP History, even if it doesn’t have two hours of homework each and every night. I fail to understand why a non-AP class, taught by the same teacher as the AP class, and with the same students as the AP class, but with less homework and less busywork, is intrinsically boring.
fretfulmother, to clarify, do you mean 6, 80 minutes blocks over two weeks (some weeks having fewer classes due to an A day B day schedule), which would be a total of 480 hours for every 2 weeks, and therefore an average of 4 hours/week? We meet 90 minutes every day, so 7.5 hours per week.
My children met eight hours per week for upper level science classes.
My children attended school with a significant number of the pre-learners. (Students who take a class in the summer prior to taking the same class the next school year.) It probably started in about the third grade and continued through high school. My children never thought they were at a disadvantage compared to their classmates. They still earned good grades. The pre-learners still had to know the material to pass the exams.
Several posters equated the pre-learning as cheating. It didn’t impact my students that way at all.
In TheGFG’s case, the AP Chem course was taught with the summer course as an unannounced prerequisite.
I think it is wrong for a public school to offer high school classes that have formal outside instruction as a requirement to understand the material in the class. The high school ought to offer all of the prerequisite material during the regular academic year.
I don’t think that pre-learning is cheating, exactly. However, I think that the highly selective colleges should ask students about all of the formal instruction and tutoring they have had. In my opinion, the transcripts are misleading, if they give no indication that one student has had formal outside instruction in the material of the course, and another student has not–even if their grades are identical or even if the student who has not been “pre-taught” actually scores higher.
I have a problem with the public schools adjusting their course content at a given grade level to accommodate students who have had paid instruction outside the school. It is fine if those students are moved up to a higher-grade-level, where the course does not go back over things they have already learned.
I have no problem with students accelerating to the limits of their interests, gifts, and time. However, if they are going to accelerate, they ought to do it “for real.” That is, when they have completed a course already, they should not re-enroll in it. My university does not permit students who have previously passed a course, at my university or elsewhere, to take it again for credit.