You have an interesting perspective. I have never heard of Ivy parents getting involved in their kid’s homewoork or class peer issues at the college level
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I wanted to respect the time you took to respond to my two-sentence remark (is that first line even a sentence, lol? I ACTUALLY just looked up the definition of a sentence. “…usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation.” So, lo & behold, end punctuation does not define a sentence. Learning Friday!
Seriously, I mean, look, Bill deBlaiso really politicized these notions during his time as mayor of NYC and what DeSantis in Florida is planning is in such bad faith, I’d be happy to read that research, but at the very least, your response led me to freshen up on this situation a little…
Not even close, when compared to Oak Park ($143,000), La Canada ($187,000), San Marino ($175,000), and Palos Verdes ($202,000).
Median income in Santa Monica is somewhat around $98,000, which, in the extended LA metropolitan area (LA-Long Beach-Anaheim), just misses the top 40% by income. If the median income in a district is a bit below the 60th percentile for income for the LA area, that means that the district is running in the middle of the pack, incomewise, not among the richest.
Malibu, of course, is much wealthier, at $163,000, but the vast majority of the students are from Santa Monica.
California was experience unsustainable growth for years. However, to be honest, it should also be mentioned that, until 2020, California’s population had been growing for decades. In fact, California’s population did not drop once during the 20th century, and continued to grow until 2020.
BTW, the fastest growing age group in Florida are people over 65. Between 2010 and 2021, the Population of Florida grew by 17%. The population of people over 65 grew by 38.5%. Of the 3.19 million people who were added to Florida in that time, 1.28 million were over 65. A lot of Florida’s growth was an increase in the number of retirees moving to Florida as the Boomers started retiring. It’s not people hating places like California, it’s elderly people who think of Florida as where retired people go to live.
However, Texas is the “new California” - it’s growth is working-age people. I wonder whether we will see the same tendency in urban areas to move left, as the main population growth is in the cities. As they become more central, that can change the politics of a state. I have a feeling that Texas will eventually be a purple state.
The cities are already blue and have been so for many years. That said, Texas is much less likely to adopt new academic trends than some other states ( still strong on memorizing multiplication tables here) so I cant imagine any attempts to do away with honors classes. Also the public high schools are so large they need some way of sorting through everyone.
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I read the article and I would expect an uproar if something similar happened in my area. My area has a simpler solution. There are 4 distinct levels in my kid’s former high school school (college prep, honors, gifted, and AP) and while teachers make “recommendations”, parents can override their students into a higher or lower level (gifted level has to be standardized tested into however), but are told upfront that moving a student back to the previous level if needed will not happen until the end of a semester.
I have seen some parents make bad override decisions, but also some good choices, because they know about extenuating circumstances that teachers may not know about. I think we only made one override (From Honors Physics to AP Physics) for one of my kids (Ended up with an A in the class and 5 on the AP exam) so I liked my kid’s school policy.
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Why four levels? Seems like the school needs to be very large to support having four levels of each class in each subject.
Presumably, you mean competitively ranking students for rank-based Texas public university admissions?
No, I meant literally when there are 1500 sophomores who need to be assigned to world history 1, or whatever the usual course is. Easy to recognize different levels in a group that large.
My kid’s former high school has about 3,800 students so it is pretty large. I guess I should really say 3 levels of student (college prep, honors, and gifted) who can all take AP classes if they have taken the required pre-requisite for the AP class.
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Those other places you listed are all wealthy areas with families. Santa Monica and Culver City are, on the other hand, part of so-called “Silicon Beach”, with lots of singles and young people (e.g. in tech), which means the average household size there is small (which lowers the median household income). More importantly, these areas are very expensive, even by Southern California’s standard, so very few poor people (of any racial or ethnic background) can afford to live there.
At Culver City High, 35% of the students are low income. At Santa Monica High School, it’s 27%.
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Two things are true at once:
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Societally, the data are pretty clear that the bright and motivated middle-class kids are going to do all right in college and life even if they aren’t challenged in high school. So given finite resources, it’s more important for states and districts do whatever it takes to bring up the bottom of the class.
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Being in classes with less prepared and motivated students made me into a hateful monster. I wanted to strangle the people who couldn’t keep up. I was happy for the first time in my life when I got to Harvard, largely because it was the first time in my life when this never happened, even though I’d been in fancy private schools since age 3. I have no trouble being patient when I’m the teacher…but when I’m a student, whoo boy. I’m like 5’9" murder hornet. (God help you if you were my teacher and I thought YOU couldn’t keep up. I’m sure some of my teachers are still in therapy.)
So I have a lot of sympathy for everyone involved.
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Well, that depends on how one defines “low income” there. Is the standard adjusted for the cost of living? If it is, it may explain those percentages due to the high real estate prices.
I suspect that there are large number of high-income households without children, or with children in private school, that skew the income data for the district. The small number of low-income families are overrepresented in the student bodies, by a lot. This is true in my neighborhood in Chicago. It’s the highest income neighborhood in the city, but the vast majority of households don’t have public school kids.
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Unless there’re a large number of people living in rent-controlled housing there, I just don’t see how these people with low income can afford to live there.
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Do students at this high school and other similar high schools take AP tests where it may matter (e.g. calculus), even if the advanced courses are not officially AP courses? Seems like it would be quite annoying for students who learned calculus in a rigorous manner covering all of the usual topics but has to repeat it all in college (with the lesser ability / prepared students that seem to be so hated and feared in this thread) because they have nothing that the college allows advanced placement in math for.
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My oldest kids’ boarding schools don’t offer AP courses, but I know D22’s school did administer many of the exams in the spring, which students were welcome to take. I am under the impression that most choose not to take them, but I am not really sure of the numbers.
Anyway D22 did not take any APs. She was in full-blown senioritis by last spring so even if she had registered for any (she didn’t), I suspect she would have blown them off. However in her case, it didn’t matter.The college made all incoming freshmen take placement tests in math, writing, and language. Depending on how well students did, they were placed in the appropriate course or else passed out of the requirement altogether–for example, my daughter was placed in second semester calculus, which seemed about right to me since she had completed cal AB. She was exempted from the language requirement entirely based on her test results. I personally hope that she will choose to continue in her current language or start a new language, but she’s balking and didn’t do any this year. However, I admit that I would have been angry if I had paid AP registration fees and she hadn’t taken the tests.
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Sorry, I deleted my original post (I can get really self conscious about posting here for some reason) but I’m happy to answer your question.
Students can opt to take AP tests if they choose, the school houses them during the AP testing season. Students are expected to prep for the exams on their own and are responsible for the fees. Neither of my kids chose (or will choose, I still have a junior there) to sit for any AP exams.
Did they attend colleges which had their own placement testing for advanced placement in subjects like math, so that they did not have to repeat what they learned in the more advanced courses in high school?
My understanding is that most colleges do that for foreign languages, but are less likely to do it for advanced placement in other subjects (but more commonly do so for remedial English and math).
It is interesting to note that the AP program started as a collaboration between elite prep schools and elite colleges, but now that it is widespread among ordinary high schools, elite high schools are turning their noses up on it.