"The Incredibles"
A January 7 NYT article shows how educational rigor seems to follow the distribution of wealth in America: relatively more and more for relatively fewer and fewer.Being a top student in my high school meant taking several AP classes and taking on sports or activities. This resume easily distinguished less than ten percent of the class in an affluent suburb, most of whom went on to attend highly-selective, often "top-ten" colleges. Here, by comparison, is the current state of the nation's most overachieving secondary schools:
"The new reality for high-achieving students: work crazy-hard in high school and cruise in college. In high school, they pile on the college-level Advanced Placement courses, face reading lists that can’t realistically be completed and tackle complex, advanced ideas once reserved for undergraduates. 'The high-end students have greatly expanded their preparation and their exposure to the life of the mind and scholarship,' says John C. Bravman, vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford. 'This has been a huge change, especially in the last decade.'
"There are currently two national conversations about high school. In September, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a report on how ill-prepared high school graduates are for college, citing statistics like this one: 40 percent of college students take remedial courses. Of 1.2 million seniors in the class of 2006 who took the ACT, only 27 percent reached its college-readiness benchmarks in biology, 42 percent in algebra, 53 percent in social science and 69 percent in English composition. . . . At the other end of the academic spectrum, however, are the stellar students who are doing ever more difficult work at ever younger ages.
"As they stretch to accommodate students at both ends of the preparation spectrum, universities are grappling with that question: How do you challenge and engage undergraduates? One answer is to focus less on the acquisition of knowledge and more on how it can be furthered. Undergraduates are being offered more research opportunities and interdisciplinary programs, which require them to apply related concepts in different fields. Other efforts connect extracurricular and community service to coursework so students can road-test what they have learned.
"Advanced Placement is no longer the zenith of academic challenge. Now there are “post-A.P.” courses, for which a good grade in the A.P. course is the prerequisite. . . . Most telling is that several advanced math courses — for example, “Complex Analysis,” which blends abstract math with practical applications in physics, electrical engineering and fluid modeling — are taught by Robert Sachs, a math professor and former department chairman at George Mason University. Dr. Sachs uses the same text for some high school and college classes, and says “Complex Analysis” covers the same material a college junior or senior would take. “If you ask me, ‘Is it like the honors curriculum at M.I.T.?’ we’re probably real close,” says Dr. Sachs, who notes that he had the most students ever, 35, enrolled this past semester. The number is particularly impressive because students gain entry to the course by completing a full year of advanced math after A.P. calculus. “The courses I teach are actually a second year beyond A.P.,” he says. . . . Some students actually enter ninth grade having taken the A.P. exam in calculus.
"David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is troubled by the trend. He believes that professors can no longer count on high schools to make sure students have fundamentals down cold. 'High schools are trying to imitate college and teach college-type material instead of the high school material they used to teach,' he says. 'They are now learning the advanced stuff, but not the basic stuff.' He continues: 'We are finding students who have learned about s-, p- and d-orbitals — a theoretical concept in chemistry — but they don’t know that chlorine is a gas.'
"Katherine Bergeron, dean of the college at Brown, believes the bigger issue is not about sequencing academic content, but getting students to view college as a time for reflection and exploration. It is part of the liberal arts ideal that pre-med students delve into Proust, but college leaders say many top students want to pursue serious challenges in their fields of interest earlier in their college careers.
"Some colleges have been pushing back against A.P.’s, which students rack up hoping to waive entry-level courses. At Stanford, departments are less willing to let students with top A.P. scores (4 or 5) skip courses. As of this fall, says Laura Selznick, a freshman adviser there for 28 years, 'a 5 on A.P. Econ is no longer an express ticket into the economics department.' Partly this reflects doubt that A.P. classes actually cover college-level material. But also, 'part of it is that students think they know it, but they don’t know it all,' Ms. Selznick says. She insists college academics are different from high school, even if the texts are the same.
Dr. Rhodes, of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, concurs. High school-age students are not mature enough to grasp the subtleties of some material, he says.
Many colleges frown on letting students skip entry-level courses, even with placement tests, he says. 'Some say, ‘You start out at the beginning, even if there is repetition; we want you to get what we’re offering the way we’re offering it and have our education,’ ' he says."
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posted by Burke Scarbrough at
10:19
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2 Comments:
So, should high schools attempt to sequence with local colleges? Would it make sense that the rigor of high school be followed by a challenging, rigorous, yet economical, higher education?
I doubt that anyone would argue that high schools shouldn't serve the interests of its most "advanced" students (don't withhold a challenge from kids who want one just because it's college-level material!) but teachers and students in some programs seem to be undervaluing the development of understandings and dispositions that underlie many of the practices of college-level inquiry. Instead, they're jumping ahead to so-called "advanced" material...After all, which is seen as more impressive: developing thoughtful and creative interpretations of any text in 8th grade, or saying you read King Lear in 8th grade? High schools should be focusing on the thinking routines their students use to interpret the world, not on the lionized content that advanced college students engage with. We all know students who unthinkingly spout "facts" they heard in college. Are they thinking or just dressing themselves in high-status language? A "college-level" course is more than just a daunting syllabus...it's a set of assumptions about how students work with the world they encounter in class. If 16-year-old kids aren't college-level worldworkers, then the class is nothing like a college course, no matter how similar the syllabi appear.
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