First, not being snarky, but because at the high school level, it’s the student’s education, not the family’s. “Families competing” is not the best set up for healthy academic life. At that age, it is normal and psychologically healthy for young adults to chart their own ways in life. Even if mom & dad want you to be an engineer, quarterback, or to carry on the family business, it’s proper for young adults to decide.
There is an implicit cost for any extracurricular outside the classroom, be it athletic, arts, community service or academic enrichment such as test prep. Laurence Steinberg’s team found there was an academic price to pay for more than 20 hours per week devoted to extracurricular activities. (Reported in the book, Beyond the classroom.)
It’s fine to prioritize academics; I feel many families encourage their children to spend too much time on the playing field, and not enough time on homework. Ideally, there should be a balance between academics and the rest of life. Force-feeding academics is not the answer, however.
There’s also some confusion about “preparation” for college. After a certain point of preparation, taking more courses does not make a student more prepared. All the colleges and universities also want students to be involved in the life of the college outside of the classroom. A student who’s completed an advanced academic curriculum but has no other outside interests may not be nearly as attractive as a student who’s prepared for college level work and has a track record of being involved with his community (school, town, religious group, team, whatever.)
It would violate our contracts. The teacher who is qualified to teach AP math classes, for instance, already has the maximum number of courses allowed by the contract. Only some of the kids in the regular sections would take the AP math so we’d need an extra section, but the math teacher already has 3 sections and we are contractually obligated to not exceed that number.
We can’t afford to hire a new teacher to handle additional sections because that will throw us over the state imposed tax cap which requires something like a 60% voter approval rating (which we rarely get). Districts are reluctant to press for an override of the cap because if the budget is voted down twice they get no increase at all which translates to a loss (and further cuts) because operation costs are never static. Maybe states that don’t have the budgeting limitations that we do and haven’t had to make the drastic cuts we’ve been forced to make in recent years have better options.
@austinmshauri I guess I am going to have to lodge a continuing objection to your claim that AP courses are offered at the financial expense of other coursework. This may occasionally be true, but if 20 kids are in a history class, changing the sign on the door from “History” to “AP History” costs not one penny.
Just as important, the school district featured in the article has more money that Carter has Liver Pills. Money simply is not an issue. The decision to refuse to provide services to educationally advanced students started because some fourth-grade kid told his mother his fee-fees were hurt; finances had nothing to do with it. While I’m sure there are exceptions, most schools that have lots of AP classes (where the kids can pass the tests) tend to be fairly wealthy. There is plenty of money for everyone in these schools.
According to the New York Times story, this is not about the allocation of resources, which are plentiful. This is a decision to hold students back in order to make average students feel better or to keep them from working too hard. For many students, taking four or five AP classes in a semester is a breeze, and it’s not right to stop them just because every student is not equally able.
In addition to the issues expressed above, not every high school teacher is competent enough in his subject to teach the AP level. For that reason, the school can’t just change a regular or honors classinto an AP class instead in order to meet the demand. Not to be mean, but our teachers are not as highly qualified as we would like them to be. S had a Calc BC teacher who did not understand the more difficult concepts very well, and therefore could not deviate from set examples when teaching, or answer any questions. D had a biology teacher who did not know/could not explain the more advanced material for honors level, and now she is teaching youngest D’s AP Bio and not doing a good job. She was doing so poorly teaching AP several years ago, they had to set up a mentoring program for her with another teacher. She is still not qualified, but the school needed more sections of AP to accommodate all the Asian pre-meds (and yes, they are pre-med already in high school lol) whose parents complained their kids were being shut out of AP. In fact, it was AP Biology which made it necessary to implement an application system to get in AP classes. When demand for the course first started to exceed supply, the school simply allowed the scheduling program to decide who got AP Bio and who didn’t from among those who had registered for it. But then parents threw a fit because their very bright S or D who had straight A’s and who attended science classes Saturday morning at Columbia Univ. didn’t get a spot, while lesser students did. So now a student has to justify why he should be in AP over someone else, which only fuels the craziness of taking more outside classes, etc…
Sure it is easy to say just get off the hamster wheel, you don’t have to stay on the same track as the tiger parented kids, but in reality, you just can’t. Because now the smart A-/B+ kid who is applying to a good school (let’s say one with a 25-40% acceptance rate), who might have looked pretty stellar in the past, is now faced with an applicant pool of tiger kids who might not have gotten in to their “elite” ranked school (because there are now many more qualified tigered applicants for those “elite” ranked schools to choose from and only so many spots to go araound) or has applied to a lower ranked but still very competitive school as a safety. The smart A-/B+ kid with fewer APs and less spectacular ECs (like he didn’t find the cure to cancer over summer break or play piano at Carnegie Hall) is not going to shine nearly as brightly. Of course the 25-40% acceptance schools are going to want to up their stats by accepting the tiger kids it make them look better so now that school becomes a “lottery” school for the A-/B+ kid.The tiger parenting mentality ups the game across the board.
I am not saying that schools with acceptance rate below 50% are not desirable and are not offering outstanding educations, certainly they are, in fact my kid will be attending one. I am just saying that in our instance absolutely my kid took more AP classes than was probably necessary because she was trying to at least keep semi -competitive with the tiger kids. (and my D16 would like to throw in - FYI AP Music Theory is the hardest AP exam out there, harder than the AP Physics exam IHO) If you want to cut the number of AP exams cut the language APs, high achieving arts and humanities’ kids deserve the same opportunity to showoff their skills as the STEM kids.
I should add that not every student and parent is obsessed with the Ivies et. al. Rather, as I posted on another thread, one problem the rat race is causing is that now to be admitted to study certain fields at our local public universities, the standards are inching higher and higher each year. A friend’s D applied to The College of New Jersey to major in biology, and received a letter saying that if she did not have at least a 4.2 GPA (which is impossible to get without taking weighted classes like AP’s) and an SAT of 2250, she should expect to be denied admission. I’ve heard gaining admission to certain schools at Rutgers is equally tough, eg. the engineering school. So you should understand that only those who run the rat race are getting in the better STATE schools in STEM fields. Please stop acting like the problem is merely that parents don’t want their special snowflakes to end up at Rutgers instead of MIT.
Cross-posted with labegg, who explains the issue well. Rutgers takes the top 5% of NJ high schoolers who apply. The top 5% at West Windsor and the many other districts just like it are going to be pretty darn stellar. NJ has one of the highest Asian populations in the country, so the culture change here has upped the anted for everyone.
Not quite true about Rutgers, even engineering, unless the kid applies late. a B+ student with good SATs (at least as of last year) will get in. TCNJ is weird in that they only have around 125 “seats” for bio majors and will not add anymore. It is almost impossible to switch into a bio major there if you don’t start out in it. But a chem, physics, or engineering major requires much lower stats.
However, I agree with both GFG and labegg. The competitiveness is moving down so that schools that are definitely not super elite, but are good and in desirable areas, such as BC and even BU or Northeastern now require very good grades, lots of honors/APs and very good SATs. There are still a lot of great colleges out there, but what were once pretty much matches for good but not stellar students are beginning more reachy. And that, to me, is the problem with the continued rat race.
No way is Rutgers only taking the top 5%. For one, it’s still the “safety” for many of the good students who plan to go out of state. They may only have enough spaces for 5% of those who apply, but they have to accept many more because their yield is not going to be that high. Many of the kids in our only okay high school get accepted there. And this is not to run down Rutgers, which is an excellent school. But it does not have an acceptance rate of Harvard.
I also disagree with the poster who said those kids who do not meet the grade cutoff often don’t succeed in the AP class. You never know when a concept is going to “click” and a kid is going to excel. If the cutoff is a single test to determine eligibility…everyone can have an off testing day.
Here are some anecdotal examples:
I had to fight to get both of my kids into the 8th grade Algebra class track, which is the “advanced” track for our school district. They had missed the cut off by a few points based on a one time Iowa math placement test. Oddly, both finished the class with a solid A. Both have gone on to honors level Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Cal and AP Calculus. In fact my D18 kid has the highest grade in her honors Algebra 2 class with a 96 and my D16r has a 94 in AP Calculus AB.
In my own experience, I missed the overall GPA cutoff at my high school for AP classes admittance (I truly stink at Math). My parent fought for me to be allowed to take AP American History and AP US Government. They had to appeal to the school board which reluctantly allowed me to take the classes. I finished both classes with an A. I recall scoring a 5 on US History and a 4 on the US Government AP exams. Yes, I failed high school Algebra, I even failed remedial algebra in college, had my high school simply stuck to their guns and used overall GPA as the cutoff I never would have taken those AP classes and I was just as capable as the rest of the AP eligible students . I am pretty confident that I am not the only person who excels at one subject and fails or does poorly in other subjects. I never did get less than an A in a history class or less than a B in a humanities class, I tested out of freshmen composition and literature requirements at my university but never made it past Algebra.
@labegg Yes but I was specifically referring to math and science, which go hand in hand. If a high level of math is needed in a science class and those skills are not there it will be difficult to succeed in the science class, hence the required math grade. Math and humanities, I agree, one can be advanced in a humanities and not so great at math.
@garland “I ask you why you think that that is the only way one can encourage education.”
I did not say that I did. I don’t think that it is. I try to challenge their kids, and encourage them to make their best effort, but it is their life. I like to know what their grades are, but any grad if fine. We focus on effort over results. I do think that they need to know the importance of education and major choices, so they can make informed decisions.
You seem to be under the misimpression that I am a fan of either the Tiger Parents or the Lazy/Academically Uninvolved Parents. Actually, I think that both are poorly informed and have the potential to do significant harm to their kids.
@mom2and “There is a lot of room between Tiger Parent (which, in accordance with the book of the same name means a parent who has super high expectations and is on top of his or her kids to continually achieve at an almost perfect level) and lazy un-involved parent.”
I agree. I was trying to characterize the extremes of parents in the article in the OP. If those two groups are even close to the majority, we are all in trouble.
@zinhead “Your experience is not the same as everyone else’s. We had to fight to get two of our kids in honors/higher grade classes when they not recommended/tested for them. Both received A’s in these classes, and stayed on the higher track.”
I agree with both of you. I have been in Pinhead’s situation once, and it is amazing how incompetent certain administrators are. It is also true that they do get it right the majority of the time. However, that isn’t much consolation if it is your kid that the get it wrong with.
For the overwhelming majority of students, 10 APs is way too many. But who exactly are you to decide for all of society what “plenty” is?
My son has a classmate who may have an IQ of around 155-160. Just so you will know, this is quite high, say one in a thousand or so. This kid, who happens to be Asian of course, could take nothing but AP classes and do quite well. Exactly what purpose is served by putting this guy in a classroom full of average kids because he has met his “quota” of AP courses. For many students an AP class simply is not difficult; they are relatively easy. I know my son, who is taking five AP classes, spends most of his evenings playing League of Legends and such rather than studying academic subjects. His coursework is not overburdening him; in fact, he is sorry and lazy, but still making mostly A’s with a few B’s.
My son wasn’t allowed to take any AP classes in eighth or ninth grade. He took two in 10th grade and is taking five in 11th grade. I suspect he will only take a few his senior year, since he has enough hours that the only class he really has to have is AP English. He will only be taking classes his senior year to keep from looking like a slacker on his college aps, since I’m sure he will arrange his senior schedule so he can sleep late and leave early. That’s more important to him than AP classes!
But back to my original point. Each person should be able to decide how many AP courses they want to take. For some one is plenty. For others 15 or 18 is the right number. Nobody should limit how much education students may receive.
Lol, one last comment before I skulk back to my corner. I am going to take exception to the characterization that the tiger parenting in largely an “Asian” community phenomenon and I guess what I feel is where many are placing the blame.
Again anecdotally, It is happening in my predominantly Caucasian school district. It was happening in my predominantly Caucasian county in Virginia. I have found the uber emphasis on grades, test scores and academic performance and competitive one upmanship occurs prominently with educated middle/upper middle class often communities full of STEM Moms & Dads. That is just my experience, I say that as the spouse of a chemical engineer.
I am speculating that it is because the poor and marginalized rarely feel they can get ahead and the wealthy have already arrived. Immigrant population often willing to do whatever it takes to get their foot on the rungs of the American ladder of success and I don’t think you can fault them for the effort, it means that we all have to keep climbing.
http://courses.chem.psu.edu/chem110/collective/background%20for%20110.html describes the expected background for Penn State’s CHEM 110 course (not the honors version), which appears to be a typical first semester general chemistry course. The chemistry background looks like something that a student who has taken high school chemistry (not necessarily AP) is likely to know. Penn State offers a CHEM 101 course for students who have insufficient background. There is also the option to take CHEM 108 (a support course) concurrently with CHEM 110.
So it seems odd that a faculty member would suggest that an AP/IB/similar background would be needed to take the introductory sciences courses at Penn State.
The AP score is to prove one’s knowledge of the subject matter to get advanced placement in college so that the advanced student does not have to waste time and tuition repeating what s/he already learned in high school. (Yes, some AP scores, like calculus, are more useful in this context than others, like human geography and environmental science.)
Weird. When I went to high school, there were only two chemistry courses: regular chemistry and AP chemistry. AP chemistry was a one semester course taken after completion of regular chemistry, and students did do well on the AP test afterward. Neither course was mountains of work, and the high school at the time sent only about a third of graduates to four year colleges (mostly state universities), though many more went to the community college, so it was hardly an elite one.
Somehow, they managed to teach enough chemistry in one and a half years for students to do well on the AP test, without any of it being super-difficult or super-high-workload. Why would learning AP chemistry now require a year of honors chemistry course, a summer chemistry course, and a (presumed) year of AP chemistry course?
Why does a student who wants to take college courses while in high school need to do so at a $60,000 college? It is more likely that the nearest college is a low cost community college, though that is likely to be limited to college frosh/soph level courses (but a much greater selection of subjects that there are in a typical high school, including AP courses). Yes, a super-advanced student may want to take junior/senior level courses at a four year college, but these are likely to be extreme outliers. Also, a four year college need not be a $60,000 college.