Public school teachers don’t receive tenure until they have reached 10 years of service here. It’s common for superintendents here to close positions after 9 years of service so that the teacher has to move to another district and start the clock over. It’s a way to manage access to pensions. That didn’t happen to me as I moved to private, but I have many teacher friends who had this happen to them.
Yep pretty amazing sometimes what people will say!
Here is the question asked by the OP:
Why are so many students taking DE courses?
The OP did not ask about district hiring practices, the interview process, racial discrimination, tenure, or any of a number of off-topic subjects. Please return to topic.
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Very interesting discussion here about “why DE?” for students, and the difference/similarities in various states.
After a full year-and-a-half of public school “stay away, learn remotely!” our family took that message to heart. Also, at our small CA public school, the pandemic reaction furthered an erosion of very experienced teachers retiring - taking AP classes off the schedule with them. With a small number of teachers handling multiple classes, the school lost French, Physics, Calculus, Chemistry, Art History, Psychology at the AP level, in quick succession.
So our kid pivoted to dual enrolment classes - some of which had very good rigor (Comp Sci, Math) and others with possibly less rigor than the AP level - it’s hard to say when you haven’t taken the equivalent AP class. My kid just took a few AP tests after dual enrolment classes in the same subject. We’ll see how the experiment worked when the marks show up in a few weeks.
For my high-level athletic kid, the DE classes allowed for a greater variety of subjects to be taken, mostly within A-G CA educational requirements, while also being able to train full-time as an athlete.
Where we are, you can only take up to 11 DE credits per semester (both the high school and community college system we use are semestered). If you do 12, you are considered a full-time cc student. So that averages to 3 classes taken each semester from the community college. My kid is attempting to earn an associate’s degree, but we are still trying to fit all the pieces together to see if it’s viable by high school graduation.
So for us, DE classes created options to account for the loss of AP classes at the high school, while allowing the flexibility to, at the same time, train full-time in a sport. My kid has made sacrifices, but things have been so crazy the past 3.5 years that frankly, it could have been a lot worse in our household. The key was having to pivot between between school/sport at key junctures in course planning. And each semester, things are a bit up in the air class scheduling-wise.
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In our district, you can take AP Lang as a junior and AP lit as a senior, get a 5 on both exams and only get credit for one semester (English 101) at the state universities. But there’s a senior year DE English 101/102 available as well (taught at the high school) that transfers to the state universities and covers the entire freshman English sequence. You pay community college cost for the class. Two of my kids chose the AP class. The third could not manage the pace of AP and was in three music classes so for scheduling freedom he actually did DE English 101 at the CC. It was a great class for him and helped him with his writing skills a bunch (what he is capable of is amazing but the writing process is a real struggle-this class helped a lot). And it made room in his high school schedule for all that music. He ended up attending college in a different state (state U) and that dual enrollment class still transferred.
Another kid finished calc BC junior year and the high school threw together a DE calc 3/multivariable class for the handful of kids that year who had done that. I’m not sure it was the greatest class in terms of instruction (the high school calc teacher taught it and I think he was rusty!), but she did fine in future college classes and was just a course or two shy of a math double major. She didn’t repeat anything.
It’s also not a fair assumption that all community college or DE classes are taught at a lower level than university classes. My spouse transferred to what is now a top 50 from a CC in CA. One of the hardest classes he ever took in college and grad school was a biology class at that CC. I’ve taken CC art classes more recently for fun. One of the professors also taught at big state U a few miles away. Great class. Another had tons of real world experience and was an excellent teacher. My son has taken a couple of summer CC courses for gen Ed’s to fit everything in his degree into a compact time frame and the CC courses have been quite comparable to the university ones.
One other consideration is that DE courses can affect both high school and college GPA depending on how the university attended handles transfer credits. AP course grades/test scores won’t affect college gpa.
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My D17 was in public school and took dual enrollment at the community college to fulfill her foreign language requirement. Two semester CC classes count as three years of high school Spanish. CCDE classes can definitely free up their schedules for sports and other activities.
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In my DD’s school district, DE and AP classes are equal from a GPA standpoint. However, DE classes are generally much easier to get As than the AP classes in her school. Kids are also saying that that the classmates in her high school are more better academically than the local college kids.
A few random points:
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In my kids’ high school, DE is paid for by the state (I think), so this helps the school’s budget. The usual APs offered, but no honors level.
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The weighted GPA. DE courses are weighted 1 point and then x the number of credits, which is often greater than a regular high school course (it depends). It’s weighting on steroids. The variety of DE courses is wide and can be started as early as freshman year, assuming the prereqs are met. As you all know, with test optional seeming here to stay, GPA is king. Per the School Profile, the top quartile for weighted GPA is something like 4.2-4.8.
A kid with a 4.0 uw can take the usual APs, let’s say 8 (with 5 by the end of junior year), and barely inch over the threshold of that top quartile for the 6-semester GPA for college apps. The ONLY way to be even close to top 10% (which would be a guess, as it’s not reported) would be to also take several DEs. I would call this gaming the GPA, but that is the nature of things these days. A rising senior with 4.0 uw/4.25-ish w, 1550, the usual APs plus DE math planned for senior year, is barely into the top 25% for GPA. What does that say to colleges? There actually wasn’t a ton of grade inflation before, even though the reported quartiles make it seem that way. However that is changing, which leads me to…
- Grading. At the start of the school year, the school changed to Standards Based Grading, which does not apply to AP or DE courses. My current freshman greatly dislikes this grading system (understatement!) and so is taking some DE courses next year, including English, to avoid SBG/SBL. Fingers crossed, as we know there are risks for college GPA down the road if he applies to grad school.
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Socalmom007 Do you know if this is true only for applying to UCs in California? Do most universities (private or outside California) consider 2 community college (DE) language classes equivalent to 3 high school years for college admissions? Thank you!
That is school dependent so you would need to check each school’s website to determine their DE course policies.
This could very college specific, including the college the course is taken at – note that California public college beginner foreign language courses are typically 5 credits, versus 3 or 4 at many other colleges.
Why was in considered a DE class if it was being taught at the high school, by the high school teacher exclusively for HS students?
I’ve heard of this recently. It seems like a fair number of community colleges develop partnerships with high schools where the community college trains and certifies a high school teacher to teach the community college’s curriculum for a specific class. Then, the community college agrees to give credit for it as a community college class, and gets some tuition for the class from the high school.
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Yes, I would imagine you’d need to confirm this in your state.
For the purposes of UC and Cal State requirements, community college semester 1 of foreign language counts as a year of high school foreign language and semester 2 counts as years 2 and 3 of high school foreign language.
I teach at a private school that has a partnership with a university to offer dual credit classes. The university extensively vets the teachers, observes our classes, etc… We must have a graduate degree in the academic area of the class, submit syllabi, assessments, rubrics, etc… that correspond to the college class. Families have the option to pay an additional amount to the university for the dual credit class.
In at least some California community colleges, college semester 1 is equivalent to high school year 2, and college semester 2 is equivalent to high school year 3. For example: University of California A-G Course List .
Both of my older kids did all of their foreign language at the community college and two semesters counted as three high school years. I could be misremembering the breakdown, but for A-G they had three years foreign language with those two classes.
Yes, that is what the linked UC Doorways page above says: second semester foreign language at Santa Monica College = LOTE 3 (third year of high school foreign language for UC/CSU admissions). No disagreement here.
Yes, that’s what one UC admissions office told me too. Specifically, 1 DE language class is equivalent to 2 years, and 2 DE is equal to 3 years. My main concern was how these DE language classes are seen outside California and for private schools. I get that we can check with the specific school to know. However it’s hard when we don’t know which school that we’ll be applying to yet…but need to decide about classes right now! A lot of schools that do list requirements (be it 2-4 years), don’t address language classes taken through DE. A few of the schools that I’ve called don’t know.
In some other contexts, people have posted that 1 college semester commonly approximates 1 high school year in beginner / intermediate foreign language. The difference may be due to beginner / intermediate college foreign language in California public colleges and universities is usually in 5 credit courses instead of 4 or 3 credit courses in many other colleges and universities.
However, for college admission, it is likely to be very dependent on the specific college. For actual placement in more advanced foreign language courses in college, many colleges do have placement procedures or testing, because prior high school and college courses can vary in content taught.