The divide looks racial, but it is probably more due to immigrant status (of the parents). 50% of immigrants from China and 70% of immigrants from India have bachelor’s degrees (many came to the US as PhD students). In the parents’ countries of origin, the university admission process was highly competitive and exam-based. Well educated parents tend to be advantageous to their kids’ educational achievement (whether you believe that to be nature or nurture or both). But the overemphasis on academic competition, exams, etc. that the parents may have brought from their origin countries may not be such a good thing.
Why is there such a disdain for K-12 teaching in the US, such that top-end students are discouraged from even considering going into K-12 teaching?
If top-end students are discouraged from going into high school teaching, is it a surprise that high schools have too few teachers who can teach advanced and AP courses to all the students who are qualified to take them, so they need to ration the spaces in them by adding artificially high prerequisite barriers?
Particularly since the high-stakes academic competition in both China and India comes with a whole lot of cheating and corruption.
No need to be nasty @EarlVanDorn. I was simply expressing my opinion. Your intense reaction is proving the point that this “race” has gotten out of control.
Race has gotten out of hand? It is just beginning.
The Asian population in USA is growing. I admire Asian immigrants for their reliance on MERIT. They do believe in education and they do believe in merit. Many posters mentioned that . American kids don’t need this - VIP parents are sponsoring schools and buy places at Ivys for their kids. It is official, acceptable, and considered “beneficial”. Obama’s daughters (as well as Bush’s daughters, no politics here) can choose any college they like, grades are irrelevant. Sons/daughters of Chinese officials still have to take exams, like everyone else. That is the difference.
I smile when I see that posters want to limit the ability of children to take “algebra ahead of everyone else”. How, exactly WILL YOU DO IT? Restrict access to textbooks? Prohibit online classes? Outlaw Chinese schools (many of them are run by parent-volunteers, by the way). Even if you would make it illegal for parents to buy textbooks in USA, they would ship them from Asia.
Could you outlaw all advanced classes in USA? Yes, you could. No race anymore, everyone is at Algebra 1 level by the end of high school. What should MIT and Caltech do? Extend BS education to 8 years to catch up for the missing education? Take more international students?
What would graduate schools do? (already, graduate STEM schools are 80+% international). Where would employers hire engineers? Would they hire at all, or relocate R&D to China/India?
It is easy to win a battle, but loose the war.
I teach 4 AP classes: US, Euro, World, and Comp Gov. This thread is ridiculous.
<my interest="" is="" piqued="" by="" the="" “divide”="" being="" identified="" along="" racial="" lines.="" this="" divide="" was="" economic,="" not="" long="" ago.="">
The divide is neither racial, nor economic, nor immigration related. Parents, who owe everything in their life to their education (like me) strongly believe in education. Poor Chinese PostDoc family (poverty level salary) would spend his last dime on the race, because he believes in the power of education. Rich Chinese entrepreneur would stay away from the race, if he believes that connections are more important than knowledge. Just IMHO.
I immigrated to US thanks to my education. I had less than $100. No connections. Nothing. Education gave me everything that I have. Naturally, I want my children to have the same opportunities. (I am not Asian).
US citizen and permanent resident engineering bachelor’s degree graduates go to work. The funded graduate programs are international-heavy because it is far less expensive to come to the US as a funded graduate student than as a list-price-paying undergraduate student, while the US citizen and permanent resident undergraduates are more likely to go to work upon graduating with bachelor’s degrees.
<it turned="" out="" almost="" everyone="" in="" the="" class="" (all="" asians="" except="" d)="" had="" taken="" “organic=”" chemistry"="" summer="" course="" offered="" by="" high="" school="" which="" served="" as="" a="" bridge="" between="" honors="" chem="" and="" ap="" chem.="">
- Why haven't your D taken Organic Chem with everyone else, since she had this opportunity?
- Naturally, if your D (by her own choice) decided to skip a class, the teacher would not hold everyone else.
Re: #228
The OP and daughter were not told by anyone that the summer course was a prerequisite for the AP chemistry course. The main complaint was that it was a secret prerequisite.
@UCBALUMNUS< 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.>
Actually, there may be a correlation. There is a high competition to get into UPenn. Students either take AP classes (including Sci/Math, if they want to major in STEM) or they are hooked (diversity, athletes, VIPs, etc.). I bet that the majority of students that want to major in STEM at UPenn without prior AP/IB/CL are some special students. Faculty may know, from experience, that this sub-population of students doesn’t do well in STEM.
@Earlvandorn “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.”
I agree with this conceptually, but my concern is that often parents who are pushing their kids into these classes do not understand that they are not helping them get into a top college by doing so. If the desire to take more APs really is coming from the student, and the student understands that it is really not helping with college admissions, then I think it is fine.
@Austinmshauri, it seems to me that teachers should be expected to be able to teach AP level classes. Those classes are at an introductory level, and at least in some states (not sure about NJ), teachers at the high school level are expected to have majored in the subject which they are teaching. So how is it that most of them are incompetent to teach even an introductory class in their field of study, when they should have progressed several years beyond this basic material? A math major who cannot teach calculus? A chem major who cannot teach inorganic chemistry?
Most teachers would like to consider themselves professionals. Well, professionals are expected to do a certain amount of professional education and take a certain amount of responsibility for learning things they need to do their jobs. If you are a doctor, you are expected to keep up with advances in the field. If you are an engineer, you are expected to keep current with new technology, and figure out stuff you need for your job. I’m thinking CPA’s need to keep current with changes in tax law. Etc. And these things are a whole lot harder than learning to teach AP calc or AP chemistry, neither of which changes much from year to year, and in the worst case, the teacher could take a comparable course themselves over the summer to learn the material and see exactly how the topics are being taught. (Most professionals don’t have summers off to catch up on their training nor the luxury of ready made lesson plans from textbook publishers or other educators). So, if teachers would like to be considered as professionals, they should be expected to step up and learn to teach this material if needed. The precalc teacher can learn to teach calc. The chem1 teacher can learn to teach AP. The honors world history teacher can learn to teach AP world. How are they experts on education and learning but cannot themselves learn to teach the most basic college level classes of their field of expertise? I think it’s unacceptable to throw up your hands and say, we have 12 math teachers but only one of them is qualified to teach calc and so we have to limit student enrollment in calc.
In Taiwan, they don’t: places in college are reserved for children of officials.
Meanwhile, in Mainland China, students have to take exams, but students from rural provinces need to have a much better score to be accepted.
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unfair-college-admissions-system/276995/
It’s far from a pure meritocracy.
Are you responding to post #204? I didn’t write it.
The teachers in our district are highly qualified and well compensated. We just don’t have enough of them.
@ucbalumnus : I have heard of just one school that does the AP Class scheduling on a semester vs. full-year basis, and I am quite surprised by it. But they have for years, apparently. To hear that this was available to you is surprising to me. I never heard of AP until my children were in elementary school.
I am surprised at the “bridge class” aspect of AP Chem at some schools, as that is also not the usual route that I have seen available at schools. I agree that preparation for AP Chem should certainly be a class that “regular” chem class has prepared one for.
Re: #230
Penn State ≠ UPenn
Back then, there were only a few AP courses offered (English literature and calculus BC were among them, though).
The same high school now has a much higher college-going rate, due to huge increases in SES and parental education levels in the area since a generation ago. But AP chemistry is now a full year course, to be taken after a year of honors chemistry (normal high school chemistry now has regular and honors options, as opposed to just regular back when I was in high school).
Seems odd to me that, with student demographics that favor college-prep more than before, it takes more time (four semesters instead of three) to reach the point of being able to take the AP chemistry exam than it used to.
To answer a few questions: My daughter did not know it would be necessary to take a chemistry summer class. She assumed such courses were for enrichment and advancement–not preparation. It has not been a tradition in this country to send our kids to school every summer. Summer school to us was for remedial work. Also, D was working over the summer to earn money. The summer classes cost $800-$2000 depending on what is taken and where, plus the opportunity cost of not making money. That is one reason why I object to any expectation that kids take summer classes to just hold their own. Once the state instituted a personal financial management requirement, the upper level science teachers advised students that they should take PFM over the summer or it would keep them out of an AP lab course due to the fact it would take half a year slot needed for AP Bio, Chem or Physics. So the summer course thing is becoming a necessity for top kids. D did take PFM this past summer, btw. As a half year course, it only cost $400, so we could afford it.
I don’t know how the AP Chem curriculum at our school compares to what is supposed to be taught or what gets taught elsewhere, but she failed the first quarter, and only ended up with a C- for the year, yet scored a 4 on the AP exam. (Is that normal? Maybe it is, but we didn’t think so. H is a chem engineer and considered the work she was doing to be very advanced.) Otherwise D was a straight A student and did well at Stanford also. There seems to be a similar problem now with our AP Bio course. S, who is ten years older than my youngest, did not have any issues with it. D2 tells me the teacher has sent several e-mails saying she is not teaching this or that chapter, yet they will be tested on them. D got an A in honors Biology, which was the official pre-req for AP, yet was not taught the material in those skipped chapters. I do understand that AP students need to learn a lot on their own, but this is more than what I think is typical.
@GFG: I am familiar with AP teachers severely limiting the amount of extemporaneous conversation that takes place among these bright, engaged young people so that all of the material which must be taught, can be taught. Often, the teacher with many curious, stimulated students wants to see where the breakout conversations go, but will express to parents that the mandated curriculum instruction time would be seriously hampered by such.
I am completely unfamiliar with teachers making it plain to students that there is material which will be required for them to master that will not be covered during class time. One of my daughters, however, had an AP teacher whose testing style made it clear that that is what would happen. There was no way to address the issue with the teacher as my daughter just decided to dig in and take her lumps. She did great, but I was a little miffed.
Sending our kids to school every summer beyond efforts at enrichment and advancement does indeed threaten to become the new normal, and I intend to hold out against it for as long as possible. We love learning here in this home, and our evening conversations and afternoon polemics give rise to that, but at some point enough is enough. And so far, so good. (Glad to know we are in good company.)