Posted on 01/16/2017 12:21:38 PM PST by EinNYC
Well, just like a rising tide raises all boats, a falling tide lowers all boats.
Charter Schools. Oh wait, the left is against that.
The district eventually lost accreditation. KC public schools within the district are a lost cause and a huge waste of money.
It costs a million six to set quotas?
Lord, what a racket.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.
First - manufacture a problem, or cherry pick some existing issue. Next - spend money, distributed through your cronies, to “solve” the problem.
Its the leftist way.
Some of these kids, I’m telling you, you cannot get the bar low enough. You can lay it on the ground and try rolling them over it, but that’s about it.
And how. I have known more than one AP teacher who has left because of this forcemeat approach. It does not work, but it looks good to the gullible.
Good input. Thank you for posting about your experience.
Two fallacies achieved critical mass in the 1960's. First was the "everybody should go to college" nonsense. This led to the dumbing down of academic standards in many high schools so that poorer students could take nominally "academic prep" courses, and make grades. Of course, they graduated with a credential that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Colleges responded, for the most part, by reducing their own academic rigor to accommodate the new flood of pseudo-scholars drifting over from the high schools. Then racial angst got into the mix and magnified these tendencies.
This might have been manageable if traditional ability grouping had been preserved, but this became difficult in the brave new world of racial hysteria. In many cities, including mine, it was verboten for advanced classes to be too white or Asian, and for the remedial track to be overwhelmingly ... well, you know. The race police with their pigment meters took tracking off the table.
How then to sneak academic rigor back into the curriculum at the typical, non-elite high school? Gifted and talented programs were an earlier attempt. The problem there is simply the name. All parents want their kids to be gifted and talented, and the race police were on the case. Then AP and IB programs began to be popularized. The key for these approaches is that they opened recruitment with the pitch that "this is an opportunity to earn college credit by doing a whole lot more work!!!!" This pitch naturally led to voluntary adverse selection by the usual suspects, and voila! ... de facto tracking has sneaked back into the system.
As far as I know, there is no way NYC can undercut the grading rubric on AP exams. It's perfectly fine for NYC to try to increase minority enrollment, and NYC can teach these courses with as much rigor as the traffic will bear. But at the end of the day, the kids are going to have to sit for a national AP exam, scored on national standards, with colorblind judging on anything not reducible to an open and shut, right or wrong answer. (AP art, for example, where kids submit a portfolio.) NYC and the DeBlasio gang can try to treat AP enrollment as a racial entitlement, but they are no more able to influence exam scoring than they are able to control SAT or ACT scores.
Let’s also take small kids and put them in the NFL. What could go wrong when you put someone in that sort of position?
Take it you didn’t do so hot on you APs?
Sounds like Hartford, CT and the aftermath of Schef v O’Neil.
I've taught them. The advantage is that they offer college credit. The disadvantage is they control the curriculum. A gifted student can get college credit through online college courses or in many school districts options going to a local college and getting both college and HS credit.
Save the money. Lower the standards for AP courses. Teaching to the lowest common denominator seems to have graduated more of them for years.
Advanced Placement consists of collegiate-level classes in the sciences, math, and social sciences for high school students to take. While I disagree with affirmative action and agree there is an ambition gap for many students, I support AP classes because they do help more ambitious students out in areas that have a low budget for their wider curriculum. I would not have gotten my two-year degree nearly as quickly if I hadn’t slaved away at those classes in high school and earned AP credits in the core curriculum.
You would need a sea change in the culture. Not even sure money alone could address that.
Thank you for the explanation.
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