<p>I did mention ‘not generalizing’, did I not? Also, it’s one thing to cooperate in small class sizes and small school sizes, and quite another in a school of several thousands. My youngest one is in the pre-IB program with classes in the 15 student range and there’s LOTS or cooperation there. But that is by far the exception, not the rule. One pre-IB section in a freshman class in the four digits, lucky those who signed up for pre-IB :)</p>
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<p>Ummm… what? AP courses in high school are not required prerequisites for college courses except for a tiny number of colleges that want students to take calculus in high school. As long as the regular high school level courses are of high quality, the college-bound student should be well prepared for college courses. (Unfortunately, many high schools do not teach regular high school level courses very well – though at such a school, the AP courses may not be taught very well, resulting in 1 scores on the AP tests.)</p>
<p>Op,
I apologize if some of this is repetition, but I haven’t read all of the posts.
Your choice of HS might affect your kids’ ability or desire to go to college.
- In HS, peer groups start to have a lot of influence. If their friends are not 4-yr college bound, and if your kids are influenced by peer pressure, then it may affect their desire to go against the tide and they might want to attend a cc
- Is the HS’s curriculum rigorous enough to prepare them for college
- Are your kids’ “smart enough” and can withstand peer pressure enough and motivated enough to do these things outside of school, with either: your guidance, a tutor’s help, enrichment classes, cc classes, AP self study, etc to get the college prep that they need?</p>
<p>CA public schools get ratings, which are published by CAs dept of education. People can look up if their school is a 1-10 ranking. You may want to see if similar numbers are provided by your state.</p>
<p>Assuming your school is poorly ranked, you ask whether the lack of competition will help your kids get accepted to better schools, or will the low rank of school hinder them. Generally, the low rank of school will hinder them. Colleges will often take from HS where the quality of the students is generally “known” so that they know that they can handle the work. If they take the val from a “low ranked” school who has never had a previous student attend this college, the college runs the risk that val does not graduate from college and affects retention rate. However, they might take the risk of someone from “low ranked” school if the kid is a URM, first gen college, etc. Colleges sometimes go to the inner city schools in CA to let the kids know that colleges are available, in hopes of drumming up the URM or first gen college. So if you, Op, are not in that category, I would estimate that being top ranked student at a low ranked school is probably worse than being a mid ranked student at a top ranked school. Additionally, you said that the school does not give out many As, thus a high GPA is also not necessarily a benefit of attending this “lower ranked” school, either.</p>
<p>What are your options? Does your school system allow intradistrict transfers or interdistrict transfers? There’s private school, home school, moving. Or staying put and adding educational enrichment.</p>
<p>I personally don’t think it is important that they have school visits, caring counselors, etc. The most important part is: how are the teachers like? What are their attitudes towards college? If a school has such an apathetic attitude towards college overall, then i would imagine that the teachers don’t care much about their students will perform in college. Therefore, once their students get to college, they will not the time management skills or academic foundation needed in order to succeed. This is even more tragic if the students get into top tier schools, where competition is fierce and a solid foundation in high school material is essential.</p>
<p>Our kids went to private school K-12. We had very good public school options around where we lived, but not in comparison with the school our kids went to. We are not rich and the money we spent on their education could have been spent some where else (like retirement), but we have no regrets. The school offered top notch education, getting into good colleges was just a by product. No, we wouldn’t have done anything differently.</p>
<p>Let me bring in another perspective. If your younger children are already in the school district (it’s public, right), then they may have already formed some friendships. So, you have to ask yourself what impact it might have on their social life. School shouldn’t all be about getting into a top-tier college. They might become miserable at their new school where expectations are higher in respects of colleges. Also, you never know. They might not want to go to a highly ranked college. I know when I did my college visits this year, my favorite campuses weren’t always the ivys. Just a different perspective.</p>
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<p>Yes, but your user name implies at least a desire to attend a highly ranked college.</p>
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<p>This may be excellent advice, but you also have to consider what you’re running to. What are your other options? And what would be the impact of those options on your family?</p>
<p>Totally agree with compmom. My daughter was miserable in her supercompetitive, wealthy suburban high school. The homework load was so intense she had no time for a real education or to do any of the things that really motivated her, playing piano, writing poetry, just learning for the fun of it. It was all about getting the top grades and she couldn’t get off the treadmill.</p>
<p>So we pulled her out. She’s now in a private Christian school that is less rigorous, but really values the whole person. Interestingly enough, even though her AP classes give far less work than their counterparts at the public school, they must cover the subject pretty thoroughly in class, because she got 5s on her exams.</p>
<p>As D is now a senior, I value NMF, SAT SCORE, AP Scholar and prior classes that have placed and matriculated at better Universities. Having said that I did not think to examine those very attainable stats before D and I chose her high school. If I had it to do over… I second the post about finding a school that let’s them develop as whole person. It is possible to do both. Good Luck!!</p>
<p>My youngest is in a school that only graduated its first class in June. There are no stats about where prior classes matriculated. There are no official AP classes, though it’s possible to work with faculty independently. The school sent seniors to some pretty selective colleges but more than that, had all of the seniors in internships at places like our internationally known cancer research institute. The school just won a national award for its math program, competing against the likes of Boston Latin. </p>
<p>College prep, including parental involvement, is required. It ALSO develops the whole child AND works with kids who need extra help, AND specifically works to get more kids of color into college and beyond. </p>
<p>I would have put all three of my kids there had it existed when my older two were in school. My youngest left her previous school mid-year into 7th grade and doesn’t regret it for a second. Neither do we.</p>
<p>I think the fact the school isn’t intrested in promoting colleges to their students would make me question weither or not they are even teaching them what they will need to get into a college. Very worrying, I’m surprized there arn’t more parents concerned about this!</p>
<p>If it were my kids I would move them schools, as they should be given the best education and best chance to get into a good college when they graduate. Which does not seem like their current schools priority.</p>
<p>We did pick a different schoolout of state. Though we have school choice in our state and could have chosen any high school we wanted, they were all underperforming against the national average. Our local schools are over-crowded (averaging close to 40 per classroom even in IB programs), underfunded, and underwhelming overall. Its interesting, though, that every parent we know thinks our schools are above average to excellent because they only focus on how their school does against the state average, never mind that the top 10% of our schools statewide only comes in at 77% nationally, and thats only if you focus on the sad metric of how schools do on nationally normed tests.</p>
<p>Forget testing. We believe that instilling a love of learning and teaching students to think critically is what is missing from our schools. I like what a previous poster indicated, that college should be an expected by-product of the secondary education process, not its main goal. None of our local schools pursue broad and creative curriculums that challenge minds and move students to learn for the sake of knowledge. Instead, public schools focus on teaching to test results that determine funding; private schools teach to test results that they hope will produce impressive matriculation stats.</p>
<p>So, I agree with the poster who says run, dont walk, away from the situation the OP describes. To the poster who asks what you are running to, I say do whatever you can to find a place for your kids that puts the emphasis where it belongs on becoming a life learner. Then, college will take care of itself.</p>
<p>If this were our child, we would have probably moved to a different neighborhood that has a better school. We did in fact move to our current neighborhood when our daughter was five so that she could attend better schools. By the time she got to high school, it had been redistricted so she ended up going to a different high school. Although it probably was not quite as prestigious as the one she ended up attending, we have been very happy with the high school that she graduated from. Her high school did an excellent job preparing her for college. In fact she told us after her freshman year that she felt that her courses in college were actually easier than high school. Most of her friends from high school are very smart kids who are attending top-notch colleges. I do have one downside to point out. Since she went to a high school with so many high achieving students, these kids put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to get into the “best” colleges. It was all that she and her friends could talk about during their junior and senior senior year of high school. In my opinion, it just got crazy!</p>
<p>While I occasionally say that I would like to go to a different high school, I truly wouldn’t switch schools. (Unless it would be to a top private school.) For a public school, my high school is ranked as one of the top in my state and it has provided me with such vast amounts of opportunities. Whether it be from having my logo/branding campaign picked by a nationally ranked company to working within in my community. It offers a multitude of electives, as well as AP Courses. However, I wish I could change my school’s guidance counselors because they are not helpful, especially with the college process. The more that I think about it, the more I realize how much I love my high school :)</p>
<p>The irony of your question is that I know many people whose children have attended some of the most elite high schools in the nation. More than a few have regrets. When these schools flash their statistics, with admissions to the HYPS and such, they do not tell you that those students admitted are almost exclusively URM’s or legacies or athletes. I won’t speculate on the damage done to a young person’s idealism and self-confidence when someone of lesser talent or accomplishment is admitted to elite schools, sometime on full scholarship, and the ostensibly more qualified, harder working and higher achieving candidate is rejected flat-out. Then again, they may as well learn that while life is not fair, the cream eventually rises to the top.</p>
<p>Hello, can I take Ap Cal w/o taking Pre-cal. Isn’t pre-cal and Alg2/Trig the same thing?
I heard Alg 2 /Trig is more indepth. Please help me.</p>
<p>Agree with momofwildchild (Is s/he really that wild?), that money can buy a whole lot of tough academic work, to see what you’re made of…grades, not so much. Even the test prep argument doesn’t hold water. Those test prep classes, may lower or raise anxiety which can affect results, but in the end, it’s what’s between the ears that will get the grade, not money.</p>
<p>I would have gone to a lesser high school and gotten better grades. It was the main thing that went against my application, the fact that I went to such a competitive high school.</p>
<p>(MaryMac15535’s mom speaking:) There’s not much choice in our small town - either the local public high school (which didn’t bother offering the writing portion of the ACT when offered as part of the state-mandated Prairie State Achievement Exam, and where “none of our students take the SAT, because none of them want to attend the Ivies”), or the even-smaller private K-12 school run by the local Baptist church (not really an option if you’re not a Baptist family yourself). The public high school guidance office does post any flyers it receives from colleges, as well as notices of college fairs (the one at the local junior college is doable, but the out-of-state schools all seem to stick to events in downtown Chicago - not an option unless you’re used to crazy big-city traffic). I think we do get reps from a few colleges to visit our high school, but just from schools in our state - and not too many of them.
Basically, in our small town, it’s up to the student (& his/her parents) to pick all the dual-credit & AP classes they can, take both the ACT & SAT if needed, and connect with colleges via the Internet. (Because the HS guidance office is certainly not going to “push” anyone!)</p>