Lita Johnson quotes Leonard Pitts:
Consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal study released last month. It found that, despite some improvement, American kids remain academically underwhelming. Only 31 percent of fourth-graders, for instance, were rated ”proficient” or better in reading. Just 30 percent of eighth-graders managed to hit that mark in math.
In recent years, I’ve taught writing at an elite public high school and three universities. I’ve been appalled at how often I’ve encountered students who could not put a sentence together and had no conception of grammar and punctuation. They tell me I’m a tough grader, and the funny thing is, I think of myself as a soft touch. ”I’ve always gotten A’s before,” sniffed one girl to whom I thought I was being generous in awarding a C-plus.
It occurs to me that this is the fruit of our dumbing down education in the name of ”self-esteem.” This is what we get for making the work easier instead of demanding the students work harder — and the parents be more involved.
So this new white flight is less a surprise than a fresh disappointment. And I’ve got news for those white parents:
They should be running in the opposite direction.
For many, high school is about getting prepared for the next level of education, but here’s a harsh reality: it’s also about assembling a record that gets a student access to that higher education. Thus, I wonder if it is truly that these “white flight” families want less rigor. Perhaps uber-competition is what they’re running from. With curved assessment, students are pitted against one another, making it that much tougher in the high school described to get top grades. In my experience, the tendency in a highly competitive classroom is for the tests to get pickier in order to sort the curve. Genuine learning suffers as much under those circumstances as with a dumbed-down curriculum. So part of the problem is the way we assess our students, but it’s as much a problem with the college selection process.
I know families at West, for instance, who enrolled their students in “easier” math, science or English classes to protect the gradepoint. Say what you will, while the elite universities always assert that they look at rigor when they review an application, there is still a great deal of emphasis on GPA. And for those students interested in attending UW, the GPA/ACT number is probably the most significant barrier to admission, forget about whether they took the toughest classes.
Ah, but if they take easier classes to raise the GPA, then can that even raise their ACT scores as well? After all, more challenge should mean more expectation of having covered the basics too, right? And I do think that ACT and SAT cover mainly just the basics except for the huge effects of missing even a few questions at the highest level scores. This is why some schools and parents push for more AP classes too – to get the extra testing that shows you learned something, if not for the college credit, and to make the transcript shine in other ways if it is not all straight A’s (because classes were actually graded firmly, but hopefully fairly).
That’s why alot of these families also spend the money for SAT/ACT review, often with the private tutor route. There isn’t necessarily a connection between doing well on standardized tests and taking the tougher classes.
I wholeheartedly agree with you about AP courses providing rigor and reassurance that material is covered on which there is consensus among national experts.