My son attends a huge high school. He’ll graduate with a class of about around 400 or 500 kids. There are pluses and minuses to attending such a large school. Some kids are overwhelmed and feel lost in such a large setting. On the other hand, there’s the massive course catalog. They offer everything from classes on food preparation to acting to website design to a full range of AP courses.
Last week, Jonah signed up for his classes for next year. Steve and I greedily poured over his options. We love a course catalog, which is why we ended up in graduate school for so long. The only trouble was there was very little flexibility in his schedule to actually take some of those classes. He was automatically enrolled in English, German, History honors, Algebra II honors, and Chemistry, so he had only one free period for an elective each semester. He signed up for a year-long class on architecture, and his schedule was full. All those options, and no time to take them.
Some have proposed expanding time in high school to give students more access to job-prep electives. Others say that we need a six-year high school to help lower-income kids who have a difficult time with transitioning to community colleges. Kids would have the support that they need in these high schools and could leave high school with an AA degree and important job skills.
The six-year high school concept is primarily geared towards the millions of kids who can’t manage that transition from high school to community college. It’s for that B or C student who manages to get through high school without much fanfare, but for various reasons can’t make it through the next level. I also think it would benefit traditional, college-bound students like Jonah, who might need a year or two to mature before getting a BA. It could give him the opportunity to take different elective classes, make some career decisions, and then tackle college with real goals and greater maturity.
How would this work?
The higher ed community hates this idea. It would take resources away from the community colleges and less selective colleges. They question the ability of high school teachers to teach college-level material. But, you know, high school teachers are already in the higher ed business. They are teaching AP classes right now. Some students leave high school with a full year of college credits. Still, a move to expand high school would lead to a huge political fights.
Beyond politics, the biggest problems are money and capacity. Local towns could not support another two years of free education, but maybe if money from community colleges were redirected to high schools, it could work. There would be huge infastructure issues. Where would they put all those kids? Important details that would have to be hashed out.
There’s no question that we’re heading in the direction of expanding the mission of the local high school. There’s going to be a lot of discussions about funding and capacity. There’s going to be some bitter turf wars. But we’re definitely heading in that direction.
Apt. 11d 
Concededly, his mother knows Jonah better than I do, but I note that (i) kids mature a lot psychologically the last couple years of high school and (ii) however immature they still seem at age 18, most middle and upper middle class children do manage to navigate college just fine. So I don’t necessarily agree that there is any significant number of kids in the average New Jersey bedroom suburb who need more time in high school.
The issues confronting poor children are a little different, but I’m not convinced that expanding the responsibilities of urban public high schools is a good idea, given what a poor job they do at their currently assigned tasks.
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Community colleges should serve as the extra two years of high school, for those young adults that need it. Instead, CCs have gone the way of becoming mini universities, I think to attract college-bound kids who are looking to save money or just don’t want the full college experience right away.
Adulthood and all of its responsibilities are already delayed too long for kids so I’m not really supportive of anything that deepens that trend. My preferred solution would be to improve upon the already existing structures rather than to create new ones.
A related anecdote: I recently overheard a few women discussing at what age it is appropriate to let your kids use a public bathroom by themselves or be home alone. One women said she didn’t let her son use a public bathroom by himself until he was 13 and had only just left him home alone at age 15. There could be something else going on with this kid of course but my expert eavesdropping lead me to believe that this mom was taking a similar approach with all of her children. The public bathroom issue had never occurred to me prior to that. I started letting my son go by himself, in certain circumstances, when he was five but now I’m second-guessing that decision.
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I wouldn’t second-guess that decision. Independence is good and the risks are really small. That said, I can’t even get my son to use a public bathroom at all, nor can his father. But that’s my kid-with-AS issue.Fortunately, we are all part camel.
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“expert evesdropping” (hah!) I like doing that, too.
I agree with both of these comments — that children mature more than you imagine. I think that’s a reminder for those of us who are navigating with our oldest children, especially. I was having a conversation with a 5th grade parent (my eldest is in 7th), and she, a bit jokingly, asked me for advice as a mom of an older child (a first, since 7th graders are just newly “old”). And, I realized in answering the question what a tremendous amount of growth there is between 5th and 7th. That’s true between 1st and 3rd, too, of course, but the difference is that between 1st and 3rd, the kids grow from being “pre-schoolers” to “schoolers”. In 5th to 7th they are growing into independent actors.
I think most of us realize this, when dealing with real rather than theoretical children (how did that mom avoid letting her 12 yo go to a public restroom by himself? The child has a really large bladder? They never go to public places without a male companion? She sends him with a brother? She hovers at the woman’s bathroom until it’s empty and takes him in, guarding the door?)
Also, I think it’s a bad thing to delay growing up anymore than we do and that community colleges are the right place for extra years of “high school” (though I would like those years to be virtually free, rather than theoretically inexpensive and eligible for student loan funding, which I think confounds their use, especially since loan funding can be used to finance living expenses).
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how did that mom avoid letting her 12 yo go to a public restroom by himself?
In a separate incident last summer, I saw a mom with her son who looked to be around 11 or 12 in a busy women’s bathroom. I kind of gave her a look of, “huh?” and she gave me a look back that conveyed “screw you.” The kid looked embarrassed as hell.
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I imagine the better test would be if the genders were reversed. It’s quite one thing for a mother to take her son into a ladies’ room, quite another thing for a father to bring his daughter into the men’s room. My 6 year old daughter goes to the restroom by herself when they are together. (But I often go with her to the bathroom as a matter of course. But then I do that with my adult female friends as well).
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bj said:
“I agree with both of these comments — that children mature more than you imagine.”
Yes. I would add that kids are much more babyish with their parents than elsewhere. I’ve noticed this repeatedly with people I know that they are quite grown up, but they radically regress when in the presence of their parents.
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I share with you your frustration about course catalogs that the kids can’t take advantage of. My kiddo loves these catalogs, too, and loves the classes listed. But, in practice, the “college prep” student has a pretty limited scheduled filled with requirements. I remember this frustration as a student myself, where there weren’t a lot of choices, but where I couldn’t take art, because it was classified as an academic, full-year elective, and there was no room for it in my schedule.
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I’m not sure there have to be turf wars. I often have 5-10 high school students in my cc comp classes (out of 28). Some do well, others are shocked to fail. Motivated kids can finish the AA along with their high school graduation. However, most of them lose the high school activities component. One of my kids took the college classes option (but she did it at the U, not the cc), the other didn’t.
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Yes. Also, high school teachers not infrequently teach CC classes. My old college algebra and chemistry high school teacher has been teaching CC math in his retirement from teaching high school. I’ve also heard of a high school English teacher moonlighting at a CC.
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By the end of high school, my oldest and her classmates were hell-bent on getting out of high school. There’s a reason there are the concepts of “senioritis” and “senior spring.” A number of kids line things up just right to graduate early.
I think most 18 year olds would not agree to spend two more years as minor children.
There is the concept of the “Gap Year.” Students postpone matriculation in college for a year, and use that time to do something else. Harvard has been recommending the idea for a decade or more: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/preparing-college/should-i-take-time
I’m concerned about the transition to adulthood. Some kids know what they want to do–but their parents don’t agree. One of my child’s friends should be an artist, but his family’s pressuring him to be a stockbroker. I think extending secondary education would be a bad idea, because sometimes the students who “don’t know what they want to do” have a pretty good idea. It’s just not their parents’ idea.
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“I think most 18 year olds would not agree to spend two more years as minor children.”
Heck, yeah.
I was gone to an out-of-state college by 16.
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This is funny because I often use Leon Botstein’s essay “Let Teenagers Try Adulthood,” which argues for eliminating 11th and 12th grades, as a prompt in my intro comp class. They pretty much always disagree with him, but a few find his argument appealing.
I’m so psyched Jonah is taking German! My husband took German for a year last year as a night class so he could learn to talk to our German cousins. 🙂 In our HS we have Spanish, French and Portuguese (*eyeroll*). Portuguese is for the kids who think it will be an easy A because their parents and grandparents speak it at home.
My daughter’s options are limited by Band and Honors classes, but that’s ok. She cannot *wait* to get out of HS. I have offered her the chance to do some sort of early enrollment in college, but she hates that idea more. Because she’s 14 and hates everything I suggest.
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Why are we eye-rolling Portugese? (or was it the entire list)? There are 191 Portugese speakers (Brazil is big).
I took German for many years (motivated to read The Elf King in the original) and enjoyed myself, but Portugese is at least as reasonable a language as any other: http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm
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Oops, 191 million
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I’m eyerolling because I think it’s seen as an easy class for students. And I’d rather they offered German or Mandarin or Arabic.
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Nobody will probably see this comment within comments ’cause I’m so late, but I’ll add it anyway… sigh. 😉
I do understand why Wendy is eye-rolling Portuguese because it’s seen as easy given the high population of kids who are children/grandchildren of Portuguese speaking people in her area that motivate the offer and because she would rather have German, Mandarin & Arabic, but I’m thankful to bj for defending it.
I obviously am extremely biased because I happen to teach Portuguese at three universities (in one of them through tele-conference), but some sources cite Portuguese as the 6th most spoken languages around the world — there are 5 countries in Africa who’ speak it too, in addition to Portugal & Brazil. Anyway, last thing I wanted to say is to kind of “laugh” a bit at the kids who assume it’s an easy language because it most definitely is not! 😉
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L, sorry to diss Portuguese! In an ideal world, we’d be teaching kids to be massively multilingual, but when resources are scarce…
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L said:
“Anyway, last thing I wanted to say is to kind of “laugh” a bit at the kids who assume it’s an easy language because it most definitely is not! ;-)”
Yeah. I’ve heard so many shell-shocked college students talk about how easy Spanish was in high school and then you get to college and it’s HARD. Presumably Portuguese is the same.
Also, I’ve been in many Russian classes alongside Russian emigrant kids, and there are special difficulties to having grown up speaking a language only at home and only with your family and immediate intimates. My husband, for instance, emigrated from Eastern Europe at around 9 or 10, and his first language is frozen pretty much exactly there. While his comprehension is excellent, his speech is definitely not that of an educated adult. It’s also hard to shake bad habits that you’ve had since toddlerhood. I often saw also teachers giving my Russian emigre classmates a very hard time about certain linguistic quirks (some of which are baby talk or regionalisms or vulgarisms, rather than the standard Russian of educated people). For instance, when I was doing a study abroad, one of my classmates would botch a common irregular verb and say a babyish regular “khochete” (you want) instead of the correct irregular “khotite” (you want). This particular mistake is one that no conscientious foreign speaker of Russian would make. There is also the need to remove Anglicisms that creep into emigre speech but are unknown in the old country.
So, serious language study of their own native language is often not a walk in the park for emigre kids.
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That’s not a problem, Wendy! And yeah, AmyP, I’d say Portuguese is way harder for true beginners, but it’s certainly as hard (if not more) than Spanish. Most of my students have already learned Spanish, though and then it’s a bit easier for them.
I can only hope that more students will be interested in Portuguese now that the World Cup will be in Brazil and, in two years, the Olympic Games. (pretty sad that both of those events will probably cause financial trouble to the country… sigh).
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I’d lean more towards beefing up summer school than adding two more years of high school. My BB/BS “little” is strugging to even pass classes in HS, and summer school has been a big help, and could conveivably offer a chance to take more electives (if one passes the class.) If we keep kids in high school until age 20, but SNAP only covers them until age 18 – could we end up with a bigger have/have-not divide in the high schools…and a lot of hungry kids?
I have to say, I’m having two very different experiences in the same public schools (one with my kids; another with my “little” – it is almost like are in two different districts.)
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Kristen said:
“I’d lean more towards beefing up summer school than adding two more years of high school.”
That’s a very good point. A lot of learning goes down the drain over the summer, at least for poorer children.
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I’m a very big fan of taking a year or two between high school and college. I don’t think lengthening high school is the answer, at all.
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Our high school recently hammered out an ‘articulation agreement’ whereby kids could graduate with 8 CC classes and be halfway to an Associate’s degree by the time they graduated from a four year high school.
The state flagship down the road immediately changed its policies to no longer accept certain AP classes or college classes taken in high school. Turf wars indeed. They apparently saw the articulation agreement with the CC as threatening the value of its brand if kids could now get the flagship degree after three years with a handful of these other classes thrown in.
It makes me sad because families who are struggling economically were really excited about this program. A motivated kid graduates from high school with 1 year of college, lives at home and goes to a CC for the second year and THEN heads off to the state flagship, where he gets his degree for half of the original four year sticker price. Too bad it hurt people’s egos too much to ever materialize.
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That is so strange because i know there is a strong pipeline at many state schools from the community colleges to the flagship. The one I work at will accept many credits from CC, and indeed, at my fancy private alma mater (which is apparently a “hot” school now) quite a few kids went for only 3 years because they had enough credits from high school APs.
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I would definitely not be in favor of extending high school. I hated high school with a fiery passion and graduated half a year early. I don’t know anyone who wanted to stay in high school longer and honestly, they were the losers who have stayed in town and never left. The kids who didn’t know what they wanted to do got jobs or went to community college. I went to a similar school as Jonah and I had one elective every year after all my required college prep classes. Do we really need more? Then lengthen the school day…there are so many ways for a kid to get ready for college without another year of high school.
the only exception I see to this is kids in foster care. The way the system just dumps them out at the age of 18 is pretty tough.
I have zero issue with high school teachers teaching college level material. i have a lot of problems with the awful social structure of high school and especially once kids are 18 and can basically do what they want without parental approval, how could this possibly work? I have no idea.
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I see the financial arguments for the AP/CC classes to decrease the cost of college, but even though I took great classes at a great high school, I don’t think my HS AP classes substituted for my college classes in any way shape or form. My college was elite, but I’m guessing that the same is true at many other colleges.
We have a program that lets kids take CC classes while in high school — I recommend against it for many kids, because it reduces the amount of classes you’re allowed to take at our state universities. That is, you get stuck graduating, because you have enough units/qualifications to graduate. So, you can’t double major, or take classes in a variety of areas for the full 4 years. It also puts undergraduates at a disadvantage for applying for research scholarships & lab work. Those units you take in CC prevent you from taking full advantage of the significant offerings at our state flagship.
(The reasoning is each unit at the state college is subsidized, and you don’t get more than your fare share of the subsidy).
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Dating myself here, but I went to school in Ontario when we had grade 13. Two high diplomas were available at that time — a grade 12 diploma and a grade 13 honours diploma. To get into a college (two-year), you needed the grade 12 diploma. Universities required the honours diploma. The grade 13 credits weren’t transferable to university but the knowledge gained in those small classes more than made up for it.
In hindsight, it was terrific. My grade 13 year class was about 25 students — down from about 150 in grade 12 so one of the advantages was that we had good teacher to student ratios. The courses we took were challenging — and I’d like to think equipped us well for university. I had arranged my schedule so that I was in school half days which meant I could work in the afternoons to save money for university.
In terms of maturity, it meant that I went to university at 19 (drinking age) in Ontario so I was very much an adult in society’s eyes.
Grade 13 is still somewhat around in Ontario. Kids stay an extra year to do a “victory lap”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Academic_Credit
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Our HS has 3000+ students in senior high alone, so only 11th and 12th graders. Graduating class of 1200 this year I understand. My oldest is also entering HS next year and like you point out, doesn’t have room for the fun electives, but as a “sciencey” kid, he doesn’t much care. But – many of the electives can be taken over the summer at local community colleges.
Also languages – Interestingly, Mandarin is the easy one here. We have a very large Asian population in the district and they recently added Mandarin as an option. We heard that last year the scores were excellent because it was only native speakers taking the class.
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Yeah, that is the American way: where there’s a large Asian population, the high school offers Mandarin; where there’s a large Portuguese population, the high school offers Portuguese. All the children are above average.
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My thoughts are at least somewhat parallel to y81’s. Is there any reason to think that the B and C students who need more structure — and the schools serving them — will be the ones to get resources redirected toward schools? (Assuming, like a macroeconomist, that such redirection is accomplished.)
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“Assuming like a macroeconomist” should be a cliche.
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Going forward, I will assume that it is.
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Some parts of Canada used to have a grade 13.
Canadians?
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I see gem covered it upthread.
Grade 13 has always sounded to me like the opening of 1984.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
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I’m not enthusiastic about a school with a lot of students who are above and a lot who are below the age of consent. Kids who need more after high school can go to community college and get some courses there.
There’s too much power disparity between a twenty year old and a fifteen year old for them to be in the same school.
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Yesterday, I’m was talking with a bunch of former academic bloggers about how blogging has changed. The old school bloggers said that they blogged to have a conversation and try out ideas. Now blogging and social media is all about promoting your own research or your brand.
One of the reason that I started blogging, and have kept it up over the years, was because I liked throwing out half-baked ideas and seeing what people thought about them. A few of the ideas led to research or more finished articles that I had published.
I honestly thought that you all would have liked this idea of extending high school. NPR had a whole segment on this concept later in the afternoon yesterday. (Dudes, I’m so cool that I beat out NPR on stories.) I have to say that I was surprised at the comments here. (Not in a bad way surprised. I’m not invested in this concept at all.) I had been thinking about writing something about the 6 year school for a MSM journal, so your comments were VERY helpful.
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I still test my ideas on animals, but eventually PETA will force me to stop.
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Puns are ideas, in a sense.
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“no blog commenters were harmed in the creation of this blog post”
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“I honestly thought that you all would have liked this idea of extending high school.”
I guess we all remember high school.
In my personal experience, it wasn’t terrible (way better than junior high), but three years of it was more than enough for me.
I wonder if Jonah’s schedule will open up a bit later in his high school career. If it doesn’t, community college would be a good place to take “fun” courses over the summer. (We have a good CC in our area, and I’m definitely planning on sending our kids there for courses during high school.)
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When I was a high schooler and freshly turned 14 (i.e. Jonah’s age), my parents sent me to the University of Washington for a summer. I lived in a dorm and fended for myself. Academically speaking, it didn’t work out quite as planned. My dad and I were hoping that I would take an intensive Russian course and keep taking them during high school, but I wiped out by the end of the first week (there were so many students who had already had substantial Russian, and I had had nothing). We shifted me into a 19th century English literature class, where I did just fine. I eventually did a couple of UW correspondence courses in Russian, which was surprisingly successful.
I forget how old my younger sister was when she went, but she also got to do a summer at the UW. She took a summer Latin course.
College courses for high schoolers are an excellent idea, for the right kid.
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Congrats for getting ahead of NPR!! Sometimes I think of certain topics shortly before they pick them up too! 😉
Thanks for including these comments about blogging, I will probably cite them in a future whiny post I want to write about how blogging has changed.
AWESOME comment section, BTW, like the “old times” — good for you for keeping up the conversation going and continuing to be popular! 😉
Anyway, I thought the whole bathroom going discussion up there is hilarious and felt like blogging that too… maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Writing in your comment section would probably be more “useful” than blogging it at my place, seriously, it’s that depressing. whatever…
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For any activity, I think it’s worth asking, “why are you doing this?”
My panic level about the high school years has subsided immensely. I now have the advantage of witnessing my children, and their friends, negotiate a variety of high schools. It helps a great deal to have parental experience, rather than magazine articles.
I dread the thought of high school students doing anything during summers just to “look good” for college admissions officers. Because we live in our zip code, and we have children the appropriate ages (marketing is really targeted these days), we get all sorts of catalogs in our mailbox for activities our children would loathe. We could pay a lot of money to send them on service trips anywhere in the world, or on wilderness/self-exploration trips. We could send them to summer classes at many different camps, run by different organizations. Wow, who wouldn’t swoon at the idea of living in a dorm doing SAT prep?
In general, the kids who seem happiest and most successful are those who’ve followed their own interests outside of school. The artists and creative people used the time to draw, or take pictures, or write, or compose. By high school they should be spending time doing things, not just jumping through hoops.
I am not convinced that AP courses in high school are the equivalent of college courses. There’s also a wide variation in teacher quality. Fewer colleges are giving credit for AP courses. I would tend to say they’re great to opt out of courses not in your major, and to fulfill prerequisites.
The one thing which would make a positive difference for students in public high schools would be real, capable “college and career” guidance counselors. Who do only that, not the grab-bag of counseling they seem to end up with today. People who would sit down with students before they enter high school, to help them plan their courses. People who know the ins-and-outs of financial aid to all sorts of college and trade school options. People who can do the sorts of things UMC parents can do for their children.
I would say they should be consultants, rather than have tenure. I have heard from friends of guidance counselors at different high schools who didn’t keep up with the changes in college admissions. They didn’t have to, because they had tenure, and sent most of their kids to the nearby community college.
On the other side of the world, some of my daughter’s friends from other schools are transferring into engineering from other majors. I think they’re the smart kids who didn’t know how smart they are–their high school tended to have a system of “stars” and “everyone else” of the sort profiled in “The Frog Pond Revisited.”(http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4150499?uid=3739696&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103615520803). So, they’re well above the average in their very selective colleges, but didn’t think they were, because they weren’t allowed in to the high level courses in their high schools.
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Wow, who wouldn’t swoon at the idea of living in a dorm doing SAT prep
That does sound awful, but I did work one summer at one of the Johns Hopkins nerd camps (CTY) and enjoyed doing that, and thought the kids enjoyed it, too. (Some get really crazy about it.) It’s not doing SAT prep- I think you need to take the SAT or PSAT or something even to get in, though I don’t know- but taking several different classes taught by university faculty or, in some cases, grad students. There are also various athletic and craft activities, dances, etc. I gathered that it was expensive (a large percentage of the students were at least upper-middle class, many more than that) but it seemed like a very nice opportunity for academically inclined kids who want to spend a summer away from home.
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“I would say they should be consultants, rather than have tenure. I have heard from friends of guidance counselors at different high schools who didn’t keep up with the changes in college admissions. They didn’t have to, because they had tenure, and sent most of their kids to the nearby community college. ”
We were just talking about term limits, and, as with all such attempts to align work with value, there are good and bad effects. Lack of tenure might mean that they have to remain aware of what’s happening. But, how will they be judged? On outcomes for the whole class? For the best fits? I think that counselors face a complicated mix of unrealistic aspirations of students (and parents) who both under and over value their children and are unsure of their goals. In that environment, judging the non-tenured counselor (or teacher) can create it’s own bad effects. In the high end prep schools, for example, I think there’s a fair amount of pressure for the second 10% of the class to pick early decision schools so that the class, on average, will have a high elite college success rate. Is that how we’d judge the public school college consultants?
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Also, I think that the advice to relax is good for almost all of us but, I think that relaxing also means letting your child be who they are meant to be, and sometimes, that’s not going to pay for the things your child has become accustomed to. In the olden days, I imagine that social and monetary capital helped parents launch those children. In a world that’s more “meritocratic” (including the world-wide contribution, and recognizing that meritocracy has it’s own biases and rules), they invest in trying to make their children meritocratic if they’d want to spend their time doodling instead of doing the math problems that are tested in the SAT. And, let’s face it, even if doodling could be amazingly productive and creative, it’s a harder sell to the people who are judging you in a variety of situations.
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bj said:
“In the olden days, I imagine that social and monetary capital helped parents launch those children.”
I think younger sons were often a problem. In 19th century English novels, the question of what to do with an unsatisfactory younger son pops up quite a lot.
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“And, let’s face it, even if doodling could be amazingly productive and creative, it’s a harder sell to the people who are judging you in a variety of situations.”
I think such interests are very useful to set oneself apart from the others. Assuming a child scores well on standardized tests without prep, there does come a point of diminishing returns. I’ve never seen a study which showed SAT prep can raise scores more than about 30 points overall. I suppose I’d have to limit it to math and critical reading, as I gather from anecdotes the writing section is predictable.
Some of the top colleges are demanding to see all testing. Pomona and Stanford, for example, require applicants to submit _all_ scores from _all_ testing dates for the ACT or SAT. The rule of thumb I’ve heard is that three SAT I tests do not harm a candidate, but more could.
So the question is, at what point does more time spent on academics harm the student? (I am swimming against the cultural tides, I know.) Should a parent force a student who should be applying to art or fashion design schools to take a summer course in biology, rather than allow her to work in an art gallery? Or to give her the freedom to take a class on video game illustration, or work as a counselor at an art camp? Or even let her wander around town, sketching random stuff?
A college prep schedule does not leave much time for extra courses. Individual interests might be more easily pursued in the summer.
I’m worried about burnout for this generation, particularly in the kids who believe adults. College newspapers have recently run articles about students needing urgent mental health care while in college. Is this happening more frequently than in the past? I think it might be, particularly at the elite colleges. I think a childhood spent under constant performance pressure is not healthy. We recognize that adults need time off to function well. Why can’t we extend the same wisdom to children?
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Yes, there’s a good enough score that’s good enough. But, it’s a pretty high set of scores, say all of your scores in the 750 range. To score in the 750 range, requires missing no more than 3 or so questions in each section (out of 67 in CR, 54 in Math, and 49 in Writing). There are some kids who reach that goal with minimal prepping, but there are others who don’t. Does prepping improve their scores? Maybe not drastically, but I’m guessing that it can raise scores 30 points overall, taking you from the 710’s to the value that puts you into the elite competition.
And, yes, the doodling might show greater creativity, but how does it get judged? One main characteristic of college applications is that people are being judged by how others judged them (i.e. the school doesn’t have the ability to evaluate the doodles of 10,000 applicants, so they use the outcome of some contest or another on judging the doodling). In that context, the doodling show might count, but the walking around sketching wouldn’t.
There are hugely different levels of sophistication in playing the game that we are making children play these days, but there’s no doubt that it is a stressful game, but, I think, unfortunately, most parents also make the decision that not playing the game will influence their children’s lifes far into the future, too.
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We just finished filling out Autistic Youngest’s course selection sheet for next year. She’s disappointed to be looking at the six-year plan but without a fuller load, she won’t have enough university prep courses for applications next fall, so six years it is!
Next year’s choices are Grade 12 Chem, Grade 12 stats, Grade 12 English elective (Writer’s Craft) and a grade 10 visual arts course. Those alongside her applied class with the special needs which is currently a rotation between culinary and computer skills and a resource class to work on learning skills/coping, fill up her days.
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As someone who attended a very small private school, I can tell you that I would have vastly preferred attending a large high school with lots of choices (even if it meant not getting a chance to take the courses offered) than attending my own school where I truly thought nothing existed beyond the basics.
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I have my 25th high school reunion this summer. Because old. I went to school before electives were invented.
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Nobody has mentioned sports yet, possibly because they don’t come from a place where public high schools sue each other to try to disqualify opposing players on residence grounds. I don’t know what a six year high school would do to sports, but it would either result in kids spending two years in school unable to play football or 14 year-old kids getting smacked by twenty-year old adults. Either one of those outcomes would not be acceptable to large numbers of parents.
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I went to a public high school in Louisiana that was forbidden to engage in the major sports because the coaches feared its ability to draw students from the whole parish would be misused to dominate them forever.
On the other hand, the school did pretty much nail down the state cross-country trophy in its lobby; always owned swimming, often wrestling too, and the only reason it didn’t own state fencing up through the university level is that the LSU club was almost all alumi of that high school. So maybe those coaches were on to something.
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Do you keep aware of LA politics? And is so, what is your view on the Holder suit against Jindal’s attempt to make charters avail to poor kids?
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I only follow LA politics in the vaguest way, so I don’t know any of the details of that suit at all. If it means forcing charters to live up to their obligations under law, then I am all for it. Louisiana public schools have been trying to get out from under their obligations to all children more or less since Brown, so actually making charters do what they are supposed to do is part of a long story. (I hasten to add that this kind of problem is largely at the systemic/political level; the people with power don’t want schools to serve everyone equally or even equitably; it’s a different matter once you actually get into schools — my mom was a public school teacher for most of her career — and teachers teach everyone.)
Bobby was three years behind me, which means that I only have vague (if positive, in a HS geeky kind of way) recollections of him in that era. The R establishment put him in charge of a department of state government at about age 25; he was way out of his depth. As, arguably, he was when elected governor.
When Vitter is elected governor, Louisiana will also continue its tradition of alternating between ineffective “reformers” and “effective” crooks. I remember hearing, years ago, allegations that Vitter had mob ties, and people were too afraid to cross him in politics in any way. I can’t seem to find any published sources, but it’s the kind of thing where a silence can be just as revealing.
If Edwards gets back into Congress, he should be entertaining. He will also be a steadfast Democrat, which is a good thing. Because of all of his shenanigans, it’s often overlooked that he played a key role in bringing African-Americans into the political process in Louisiana, but that was hugely important for the state.
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There are some charter schools with good reputations around here. The cyber-charter schools baffle me. You’re basically home schooling your kid and the school district is giving as much as it costs for a regular school for somebody to help you a bit. Plus, the biggest one around here just had its founder arrested for stealing from the company.
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Sports do play a role in high school schedules. We attended a meeting for local middle school parents to learn about the high school. At that time, the administrators recommended high school athletes opt for study halls, rather than a “too-ambitious” schedule. Mind you, at that time, options were limited for everyone.
So, right from the start, there would be the athletes and the academic kids. And heaven help the athlete who blows out his knee sophomore year.
I’m for a healthy balance, and yes, high school kids should be able to play a sport. They should also get enough sleep. However, I don’t think it’s right for a school to encourage what amounts to an “athlete track,” in which students give up access to academic interests in order to play. In the long term, being able to take a course in architecture, or studio art, or double up in sciences pays more dividends than a reduced academic load.
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