I’m all for an overall reduction in the number of APs kids feel compelled to take, but I don’t know how we can raise the bar without shutting people out in a way that doesn’t privilege certain races and classes over others (another issue, I know, but it seems that one can’t be done without affecting the other).
In essence, the supps are the college’s own form of a test or further filter. We’re talking about schools with single digit rates, a tsunami of qualified applicants, and the ability to cherry pick. The key isn’t really more AP, though the right rigor matters very much. And you do have to have the grades. The key, if there is one, is kids understanding what these colleges really look for. Again, we’re focused on the admit (and myths surrounding that.) These colleges are focused on the four years after the admit. And what the four full years of hs, including choices outside HS time, help predict.
The ability to seek help or advice can be a strong positive. Not for the kid who can’t pass some class without hand holding and is magically converted to an A, through careful attention to test questions. But the kid who seeks to learn and advance and has, in general, a cooperative nature, versus solely competitive.
And, let’s not forget there are HS which restrict the number or timing of APs and their kids can do well with admissions. Plus, under-resourced schools can offer a fine AP experience, with good teachers. And, many of those bright kids do have growing access to mentoring and tutoring programs. These are both seen as a plus and are reflected in the overall quality of their apps.
In general, if a kid can’t successfully navigate hs challenges, whatever they turn out to be composed of, he needs to reevaluate the competitiveness of the colleges he aims for. Just pushing and pushing isn’t “it.”
But we were partly talking about the most competitive HS out there. We have to face that they DO produce a high number of resilient, top performers, who still have lives, do some good around them and get enough sleep. The shame isn’t in stretchy kids, it’s in those running just to keep up, engaged in what may be a futile effort.
Success in these demanding courseloads requires both sufficient intellect and reasonable efficiency/organization. Kids who fall short on either will be struggling. I’ve heard quite a few stories from other parents about the high workload of my 9th grader’s current STEM classes (not even AP classes yet), and when I ask her she says she doesn’t even pay attention to when the tests are or bother to study. The school does limit access to this program.
There is always going to be a spectrum of ability. For any limited access honors class, if the bar to enter is set too low, you will have students who struggle. If the bar is set too high, you will deprive students of an appropriate education. It seems to me the school really has to err on the side of the lower bar. They don’t know how stressful and timeconsuming the work is or will be for each student. They don’t know how many hours per week the student had to work to succeed in the previous class. That’s all for the parent and the student to evaluate. It’s not really a public school’s place to block a potentially qualified student from pursuing their education. The school should simply advise them if they are apparently among the less qualified students going in to that class that they need to consider whether they can handle it.
With my third child, I am seeing a different teaching method. The pattern seems to be to discuss topic A in class, and then assign the student to learn topic B on his own at home and do a homework assignment to prove he learned B. In the past, the style was to teach topic A, then assign homework related to topic A to reinforce it and check for comprehension… Perhaps this model is a function of our ever-expanding curriculum. Regardless, clearly this new style benefits independent learners, who are likely to be the most intelligent kids anyway. That said, though, if the goal is actually to educate minors, rather than try to close doors on them or weed them out of challenging classes, then it’s not an ideal method. Also, the school assumes that the kid who can learn B “on his own” and do well on the homework and eventual testing is the true honors kid, whereas the student who cannot is not. He is a poser, or overly- pushed kid…
However, what I see around here, and what epiphany seems to corroborate, is that most kids are not truly learning B on their own no matter what the teachers think… They are getting taught B after school by a tutor–a resource lower SES families cannot afford (like my family.) Also, this system camouflages the poor teachers, since their results make it appear they have done a good job delivering the curriculum. In fact, they have not taught half the material! I deeply resent that those with tutors have such a huge advantage. I never had a tutor in my life as a student, yet got straight A’s in hard classes in high school. I learned all I needed to succeed at school in class. My friends who were also straight A students did not use tutors eithers. It seems that now getting straight A’s in the difficult high school classes in districts like ours is next to impossible without outside help, due to both teaching style and rigor. I resent that children may be viewed as less bright by both high school and college staff, when in reality they are just less wealthy. After all, it seems adcoms look at the SES of the district and assume that student they are assessing fits the profile when he may be way at the bottom end…
And I am telling you that your idea has been tried and is not working – at least not in these ultra-competitive schools, which do include a spectrum of ability. Simply enrolling in the school does not make lower-performing students optimal performers, and in fact sometimes the opposite happens, because of the poor teaching some of us referred to above, because of the “face-saving” universal expectation on campus of vanquishing every setback. (You didn’t suggest that enrollment transforms every student, but the mythology on campus is that this is true.) You enroll in the school; you are simply expected to do very well, and if you don’t, God help you. Again, I mentioned this either on this or another thread – the recent meltdown of one of my students, who had nowhere to turn on campus and was humiliated daily because she couldn’t cut the STEM expectations. (Um, she wasn’t a STEM-oriented student, so no surprise there; the problem was that she had to stay “in the closet” about it, and the shame about it almost caused her a nervous breakdown.)
It’s also a culture of massive cheating, so if you have too much integrity or are simply not that clever in that department, you will also suffer, comparatively.
All of this reflects failures of adults, who refuse to lead, refuse to set boundaries, refuse to change policies where obviously needed, and who succumb to verbal bullying by parents who have convinced their children that it’s Harvard or Bust. (Literally)
Added to this is a powerful strand in the culture of youth today, which assumes that for some reason it’s essential to be rich, not just nice to be rich. Essential. If you are not rich, you are a failure. There simply is no in-between. Something cataclysmic will happen if one does not become rich at 25. Is it something cataclysmic in their families? If so, once again, shame on adults.
I agree with you. The school cannot fix bad parenting. But I don’t think the school should limit the educational opportunities of students because some parents are bad parents. And I don’t think there is anything a school can do about the ultra-competitive mindset. Suppose they limit the enrollment to the top 30 students. The others, driven by parental expectations, will self-study the APs, they will take classes online, they will hire private tutors to teach them, etc. It’s already been stated on this thread that they are getting private tutoring, we know that some of them are being sent for years to test prep school also.
Most school administrations are not going to stand up to angry parents who want Johnny to be in a more advanced class. As long as the test scores are satisfactory, why would they?
The cheating is particularly sad. What some parents will do to their kids astonishes me.
Epiphany, I have no doubt that you are describing what you see… but even here in the Northeast, your observations do not jive with the town I live in or the general area (with one or two exceptions). It makes for good media content, but I still think that a far greater problem (impacting many more kids) is parents who don’t care. And I’m not talking about the drug addicts and the ones making crystal meth in the bathtub-- although clearly there are kids who grow up in homes where education is just not going to make it onto the priority list any time soon. And I’m not dismissing what a tragedy that is.
I’m talking about middle class and upper middle class neighborhoods where parents think nothing about taking a kid out of school four days before Spring vacation because they’re going to Disney or on a cruise and they didn’t want to face the crowds by waiting until the vacation actually started. Parents whose kids leave before the school day is over because they’ve got gymnastics or karate or private fencing lessons. Parents who can’t be bothered to show up for college night, and then kvetch like crazy six months later that their kid missed out on applying for a big merit scholarship because they didn’t take the SAT 2’s. Even in elementary school, kids who get the message that sports and entertainment trumps education. I was at a parent meeting once where several folks complained that the early start to the school year (before Labor Day because of how the calendar fell that year) meant they couldn’t take their kids to whatever professional sports event fell the night before. And that those tickets cost a lot of money.
Even here in the craziness of the Northeast- I see far more HS kids who are told “commute to local state U”-- make the best of it, because mom and dad won’t give up the ski vacation or the trip to St. Martin over Xmas. Kid qualifies for no need based aid- there is no need- and parents complain like crazy at how expensive the public U’s have become. For some kids- this works fine. They have a lovely childhood, which ends at age 17 when the parents buy them a jeep or something suitably sporty so the adults don’t have to carpool or make their kid take the school bus. And they head off to college- where some of them really knuckle down and do really well and take advantage of every opportunity, and some of them just join a fun frat and major in beer pong and end up with a degree in sports management or whatever.
And the STEM craziness? I don’t see it. Easy A’s, rampant grade inflation, parents who say things like 'why does she need calculus? I never took it and I turned out fine".
Blossom, you could be describing my neighborhood in SE FL. New car, and attend UF or FL State, or UCF…
My son’s true peers did amazing things. These were the kids in top 5 of class. They went OOS, Peace Corps (after college), naval academy.
I think the number of schools/communities where this hypercompetitive culture exists is very small. I sincerely doubt more than 10 kids from our large high school even applied to Ivy-level schools. And half the kids I know who got in to such schools chose not to attend them. Not everyone is slave-driving their kids into Ivy/STEM and nearly everyone in the top 10% of our graduating class happily headed off to the best state schools.
Mathyone- or the worst state schools- the one in easy commuting distance to where I live won’t be competing with Michigan or Virginia or UIUC any time soon!
We get a teenage suicide from time to time (like every other community) but I don’t recall anyone ever connecting the dots to academic pressure. These are sad cases of young people who’ve been suffering from depression or mental illness, not particularly high performers academically.
So sad. But not a case of kids being pushed beyond their abilities academically.
The last few posts are all very interesting but have nothing to do with the subject of this thread. Obviously some of you think I’m exaggerating but I am not.
No, I don’t think you are exaggerating. But I do think for all the talk that the vast majority of communities simply aren’t like this. The fact that 99% of schools can allow students with halfway reasonable qualifications to take AP classes without them turning into sleep deprived zombies who are so stressed they become suicidally depressed shows that these issues are not being driven by AP policy.
Funny, a friend just sent me an article about our school being on Washington Post’s list of the most challenging high schools in America, based on percentage of students taking national college level tests like AP. Schools that had restrictions as to which students could take AP’s are lower on the list than schools where anyone who wants to take them, can. Test scores did not matter for ranking purposes. Consequently, there are schools where folks around here would never dream of sending their kids which landed far higher on the list than supposedly better schools.
Anyway, I have no doubt there are high schools out there where kids can take five or six AP’s and barely break a sweat, since the homework load and grading policies can vary quite a bit by teacher and by school. There are parochial high schools around here where it’s well known that almost everyone takes AP’s, there is not an excessive amount of work, but their kids’ test scores are usually 1, 2 or 3, whereas our kids are earning mostly 4’s and 5’s. (And then there are those lucky students in well-taught classes with not so much homework who can go to bed by 10 every night and get 5’s anyway, and their parents seem to all post on CC.) All I can say, whether some believe me or not, is that at our high school, an AP class will entail boatloads of work regardless of how brilliant you are. I get annoyed at the implication that if the student needs a lot of hours to complete the reading and homework and is barely sleeping, that’s because he didn’t really belong in that class or lacks time management skills. D’s English teacher from my previous post just assigned yet another partner project today, along with the normal nightly homework. D is calm, but has no idea how she will get everything done, since the exact same thing is happening in her APUSH class. Every day they’ve been getting a new major assignment, along with a secondary one. Even geniuses still need to read those textbooks and novels; research and write those essays and papers; create those Power Point presentations, costumes and props; memorize poetry; and compose original poems. The work will require a significant time commitment unless you are cheating. My older son was highly disciplined, worked quickly, and was quite bright, yet he and his buddies were all up late and only he did sports. Their circle included the young man with the perfect 1600 who went to Princeton, the boy who went to Columbia and is now getting his PhD in biomedical something, the kid who went to Brown and is now working on a PhD in philosophy at Princeton, and others like them. They were not all over-achievers.
By over-achievers, I meant to express they were not pushed by their parents into schedules beyond their intellect.
GFG and Epiphany- I believe that you are describing with 100% accuracy what you see. I’m just pointing out that this is not a universal phenomenon, and I don’t live in rural Wyoming.
My kids never did a costume, prop or Power point (one of them dressed up as an animal in the 4th grade but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about). Other than in a basic “computer skills class” in HS, they never once did a group project. I realize these types of activities are enormously time consuming- and could easily move a HS kid into overload. But my kids never did these.
My kids weren’t geniuses, nor were they chronically sleep deprived.
So much of this pressure cooker is local. And cultural. In my neighborhood a lot of the kids are in Catholic HS. The parents assume/expect the kids to go to a small list of colleges- BC, Georgetown, Notre Dame for the achievers. And a bunch of colleges below that for the less driven. And a few colleges below that for the kids who are just not that serious about academics.
And they are all fine with this order of things. I have a friend living in one of the five boroughs of NYC in a neighborhood with a lot of Syrian Jews. Their kids will go to Yeshiva University/Stern or commute to Touro, Queens college or Brooklyn. Occasionally Hunter. None of these kids are stressing about AP’s even though many of them (I am told) are quite serious about academics. Queens has a reputation for being particularly good for Med school advising and admissions.
I am sympathetic to what you are observing- but pointing out that even in the NY metro area- this is not universal. And I imagine that it’s the same in Silicon Valley- the kids in Atherton might be living completely different lives than kids in a less upscale community (I’m sure in California they have their same pecking order of “fine but not so hard to get into” colleges). Nobody is staying up until midnight to get into Touro (or the California equivalent). And from what I hear, the kids end up doing fine- dentists, social workers, occupational therapists, the full gamut of the helping professions.
I only share my experiences because I think the tendency is to blame parents when kids are under too much pressure. I suppose what I am saying is that the parents too feel victimized by the pressure inherent in the environment and may not have the option to move or pay more for a different one.
My friend’s son wanted to try out for an academic team at his LI, NY public high school. When he arrived at the tryouts, there were 200 fellow students vying for the handful of spots. Meanwhile, his cousin who attended a small private school nearby was just walking down the hall one day when the academic team advisor passed her and said, “Hey, we need kids for the academic team. Want to do it?” So, if you are a parent whose kid attends the first type of school, do you just ignore the reality of that environment? What if your kid really wants to be on a sports team, or in the strings ensemble, or in the school play? Do you just send them merrily off to tryouts and hope for the best? Well you can do that, but they aren’t going to have a snowball’s chance in h*** of making the team/group unless they have already been dedicating themselves seriously to that activity for years. You make think that if your kid practices his cello 45 min. every single day he’s doing great, but here you need to understand that there will be LOTS of kids at the tryouts who practice 2 or 3 hours a day. So, what do you do?
Similarly, your middle school student may be quite bright and have a special aptitude for math, but if he has not already learned algebra, he won’t get a high enough score on the “algebra predictive test” to be placed in algebra in 7th grade on the accelerated track. So what do you, as a parent, do? Well, around here the parents make sure the kid learns some algebra in 6th grade.
I agree with @blossom - even for those who live in a hyper competitive area, there are many shades of gray. Our HS is one of these ridiculous pressure cookers that offer too many AP classes with some very crummy teachers. And we send a couple dozen kids to elite schools every year, for which there is ridiculous competition. And of course, since we are in CA, after ivy-level schools are considered, the next goal is to get into Berkeley or UCLA, maybe UCSD for those who aren’t “smart enough”.
However, drop down a level or two and there are plenty of kids who just bop along, taking “normal” grade level classes and will end up at other universities - which is fine, nothing wrong with that, they are getting mostly fine college educations. Not everyone buys into the culture, not everyone takes 6 AP classes/yr and sleeps 2 hrs a night. Even at these crazy places, I would say more than half the kids don’t buy into competitive culture and experience what most of us would consider “normal,” “well-adjusted” HS careers. It depends on the personality of the kids, and around here, more often than not, the personalities of the parents, to push them off the edge into the spin cycle.
GFG and blossom,
What I have seen is a profound change from local, intense hyper-competitiveness to widespread. It hasn’t transformed less capable students (who can’t pass a particular course to get into a higher one) into sudden geniuses, but what it has done is to produce a culture of pretense that, in order to survive socially, requires a student to join in the pretense that only those who take the same extreme number of AP classes are “winners” and everyone else is a “loser.” It “forces” the less capable students to reach beyond their true ability, and the schools are not watching the results of this on individual students. Who cares if it keeps the school “top-ranked” to offer an insane number of advanced classes to every student enrolled in the school? A student of mine, last cycle, was from a not-top-ranked school yet was noticed by the Elites and got into two of the three she applied to.
I think the CollegeBoard and schools are complicit in the push for under-qualified students to take AP courses and tests. Our school has cited CollegeBoard studies that claim there are benefits to students who take and fail (scores of 1 or 2) AP classes vs kids who take the non-AP class.
They also pushed a batch of freshmen this year to take the new AP Physics 1 course, but “forgot” that they were also revising the math curriculum to be Common Core aligned, and that it would be much longer until those kids saw any trig in math, and they hadn’t actually has much algebra. So, these poor freshmen (most of them smart kids) had to deal with vector computations while not even knowing how to pronounce “sin” and “cos”. The teacher tried to help, but it was a big math gap. Some of our friends with freshmen got their kids tutors and managed to raise grades to a B. Other kids dropped the class. Some just took a big GPA hit, since I don’t think tutors for bright kids is a big thing here in suburban (non Silicon Valley) California, at least among non-Asian families. (Luckily UCs don’t count freshman grades in their GPA computation.)
I didn’t see it coming to warn the parents, since DS took AP Physics B as a freshman the previous year and did fine. He had to adjust to the idea of using a lot of paper to work the problems. Homework took him 30-60 minutes nightly, but nothing like what kids this year report spending with the same teacher and a course that covers 1/2 the material. I learned not to make recommendations to other parents based on what worked for DS.
Also, several years ago the school district noticed that Hispanic kids were underrepresented in honors and AP classes. The solution was to get rid of honors classes where there is an AP in the subject, and have only two tiers of classes: “college prep” and AP/IB. So, predictably, there’s a push by kids in the middle to skip the college prep classes and go straight to AP. That works fine for some kids… But they have a fair number of kids getting Ds in AP classes and still have Hispanics mostly in the lowest level classes. I’m not sure what the point was.
Take this to the bank.
And, as you suggest later in your post, it’s not just the AP scores that are in question but the grades themselves. Do any of you have any idea how it affects students to receive a “C” (or, heaven forbid, worse) in an AP class? It basically radically alters his or her college list, eliminating many colleges from consideration, even when the student has otherwise proved himself in that subject area. The irresponsibility of schools to allow “everyone” to enroll in AP classes is beyond contemptible.