Advanced placement classes not just for rich, high achievers

[shesulsa]

As the parent of a girl who doesn't get challenged enough and was denied EXCEL classes because she was talkative and too disruptive, this article hit home.

Survey finds Advanced Placement success not always tied to wealth.

By Isolde Raftery of The Columbian
The Vancouver Columbian
May 31

Greg Plitt's Advanced Placement students aren't just high achievers from upper-crust homes. "We have a lot of students that have had Cs and Ds through school," said Plitt, a teacher at Mountain View High School in Vancouver. "Then they get in an AP class and feel challenged and do well."


Plitt was the sort of teacher Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews had in mind when he set out to find which students schools encourage to take the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams.


Mathews found that many schools work to keep their average AP and IB scores high by allowing only their best students to take the college-level exams. He argues that such an approach misses the point: Just taking the exam improves a student's chance of doing well in college.

FULL ARTICLE

Interesting - what would you call this? Classism? curious ...

 

[Rich Parsons]

I could have done better in school.

I got A's & B's occasional B- and graduated with honors and was around 75 out of 550.

Some of the best classes I had and I planned for were the AP classes in Calculus and Chemistry. I really enjoyed them and learned a lot.

I also came from the less off portion of the district. Note: I always had clothes and food we just went up north camping versus going to Paris or to some island or ..., . Not that there is anything wrong with any of that.

So I would guess I was not part of the "RICH" group (* pun intended *) but really enjoyed the advanced classes but it was so much more of a challenge with the AP.

 

[Kacey]

There's quite a bit of research that came to the conclusion that many students (not all, but a significant portion) who are termed "behavior problems" are not paying attention, talking out, doodling, not turning in work, etc. because they are bored.

If you, as a parent, feel your child is behaving poorly in school because s/he is bored, you need to talk to your child's teachers and school - and the sooner, the better. And you need to be paying attention to why your child is getting into trouble.

As a special education teacher, I have been asked by parents on multiple occasions to test their child for special education because the child is in trouble and doing poorly in school, so there must be something wrong - sometimes the child is doing poorly because the parents don't take the time/effort to make the child understand that school is important; sometimes it is because the child is bored; occasionally (as recently) it's because the parent knows someone who is (or claims) they are getting SSI (Supplemental Security Income - like social security, but for people with disabilities) and wants the same for their child (that just happened again last month); sometimes it is because there really is a problem - but since I'm in a middle school, they've usually been caught before that time if there really is a significant problem, and more often than most people expect, it's because the child is bored or the parents aren't paying attention/showing the child school is important.

I've had several parents be quite surprised that their child tests at or above grade level in a one-on-one setting, and be even more surprised when the child tells the parent s/he is bored, and that's why s/he isn't doing his/her homework.