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I bet you (not ten thousand dollars ) that ---whatever Long Island district you're in---if the parent makes a big enough stink, they will let any child in any AP class.
Still waiting for your evidence. Sorry, a bet (be it pinky or $10K) does not make burden of proof.
It makes no sense (budgetwise) to overfill a class with students who have no chance of getting a 3 or better on the APs. It's a waste of a student's time to have them in a class like that.
Just how many elite HS are there in NYC? How many schools offer special programs to keep the brighter city students safe from their peers in an effort to better foster their education?
Of course by aggregate NYC schools are inferior to Long Island public schools. But in NYC there are specialized schools where you have to pass an objective test to get in---and you can also be kicked out.
If something like that was ever proposed at a LI school board meeting, there would be a riot--unless of course EVERYONE went to the specialized school, because, you know, everyone is above average
Still waiting for your evidence. Sorry, a bet (be it pinky or $10K) does not make burden of proof.
It makes no sense (budgetwise) to overfill a class with students who have no chance of getting a 3 or better on the APs. It's a waste of a student's time to have them in a class like that.
Does your district have objective policy about who may or may not take an AP class?
It's also very common to let them take it and then pull them out.....
The worst was a punch in the face.
Yes, people can get bullied for any reason. But it varies by school district. A black kid won't get picked on for being black in Roosevelt, but maybe in Lindenhurst. A nerd kid won't get picked on in Ward-Melville like they would in Amityville.
You can't be serious with this.. You never heard of blacks fighting with other black kids for any number of reasons, like this major one> black vs light-skin blacks or black vs Mulatto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ??
I hope you don't take this as bullying, but you seem like you're still wet behind the ears on this issue. Telling me that someone punched you in the face does not mean you were bullied. Unless we know the entire story. Did they overhear you calling your entire student body "kids that dress like they just came out of jail in Lindenhurst (or) white tra*h?" ... maybe that had something to do with the punch in the face?
Quote:
Originally Posted by checkmatechamp13
Not if the school has a special program (which I can't believe LI doesn't have, especially considering the fact that you guys are known for high taxes even in low-performing districts)
I'm pretty sure most schools on LI have something similar to this: ie- honors, intermediate, basic, Sp ED levels. The thing that I don't get is, how are you totally cut off from the "general population" if you still interact with these kids in sports, elective courses, gym, outside of school, at parties, friends of friends, etc etc... I don't see how having magnet type programs in NYC totally cuts a child off from being exposed to dead beats. If anything, magnet schools (or a quasi-magnet program which it sounds like you're in), just throw the above average/average kids in with the worst of the population like Seanx4 mentioned. That sucks, IMHO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wes927
Generally, They don't have elite programs in suburban schools like they do in NYC because suburban parents won't let you take some students and say they are better than the others, or that others are excluded from this school or this program because they're not smart enough. AP Classes stink in suburban public schools because generally anyone can take them.....
See above. The elite programs in NYC sell out the majority of the students to protect a very few handful of bright kids. It's truly a dysfunctional system, it's cut-throat to the extreme and damaging to most of the city schools. A few of the students I went to college with that were alumni at the top NYC schools were honestly the coldest, no personality, most mechanical people I've ever met.
Also I'm with OBH in that AP classes at suburban schools do NOT stink - that's absurd. You have no idea what you're talking about. Anyone can take them but that's like saying anyone can apply to Yale, so Yale stinks - Ridiculous.
Hi.
I posted this here before, but it got deleted because I didn't know W***e T***h was an offensive term. So I've cleaned it up.
Before that, I posted this in the education forum, but I decided to post it here, as well, since school district is heavily prioritized when people re-locate on Long island.
It seems to me that that's the most common way to judge a school district. However, I don't think it is the best way to do so. For most of my life, I went to school in a rich, mostly white neighborhood-Massapequa, N.Y. I did fine in elementary school, but middle school was problematic, since I was a minority within the white race-red haired, so I got bullied a lot. Polish and people from New Jersey got bullied, too. Then they started bullying me because I wasn't rich (I was illegal-apt dwelling)! So, along with the expense of the studio apt ($1300), I moved to a slightly poorer and more diverse community-Lindenhurst, N.Y. I'm doing much better in school here (96 Avg.!), even though the test scores are lower, and making more friends. I'm not bullied at all-the bullying is towards more obvious minorities (I.e. Black, Mexican). Another thing-Lindenhurst's school population includes a lot of teens who don't want to learn and dress like they are just out of prison, so it's one of my main motives for being more successful, since I don't want to be like any of those slobs. In Massapequa, there was still some of those people but not a lot, so I didn't worry about trying to be better than everyone else. So here's my list of what defines how good a child will do good at school:
1. MOTIVATION (especislly at Home)-without my relatives accusing me for any grade below 90, who knows how I would be in school. It's also from how I do not want to be like my seperated parents living in illegal apts. Without motivation, there can easily be kids who fail miserabley in the best schools in the country, or those with motivation can succeed in the worst school districts.
2. ETHNICITY-it's pathetic, but it's true. A child will avoid racial bullying if s/he is either of the most populous ethnicity or the least (if they are extremely unique, they might be very interesting to other kids and could become very popular). However, if they are of an ethnicity that's uncommon but not extremely rare, it might get problematic.
3. SAFETY-this should be obvious.
4. VARIETY-where there's a lot of different clubs, there's a lot more individuality and it is easier to make friends.
5. ECONOMIC STATUS-again, pathetic but true. If there's more people of the child's economic status, it's easier to make friends.
I understand that test scores are a factor, but what I'm trying to say is that taking a glance at the rating for a school on greatschools.com isn't the best way to see how good a school district is. It really all depends on the child him/herself and how s/he was raised. Agree or disagree?
Sorry if I came off a bit snooty when talking about my grades!
Does your district have objective policy about who may or may not take an AP class?
It's also very common to let them take it and then pull them out.....
Still waiting for you to show us where this is true.
Even going back to my school years -- something called a budget dictated how many AP classes in a particular subject would be offered. There were those of us in AP English while those who didn't score high enough were placed honors. The average students were in regents and the fair students in remedial.
A generation later and my son, who was math honors tracked in 7th and took his first SAT then, wound up taking his Calc AB AP senior year. There was one class section offered with 24 seats. 660+ students in his graduation class -- do you honestly believe just anyone would be allowed in?
Time is school is valuable as is one's GPA. It is foolhardy for a parent to demand their student be placed in a course above the child's capabilities to risk a low, GPA dropping grade.
Yikes -- I guess NYC uses that terminology as some of their child geniuses will be mixing in with the general population at Rikers?
(I kid, I kid)
In all fairness, you have to realize that a portion of what we pay in taxes is redistributed by Albany to NYC schools (and other city school districts in NYC) We only get back a portion of each education dollar we send to Albany.
LOL!
As for the second comment, I actually didn't realize that but it makes sense now. I don't think the cost per student on LI is much higher than the cost in NYC, even in the best of school districts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pequaman
1) I'm pretty sure most schools on LI have something similar to this: ie- honors, intermediate, basic, Sp ED levels. The thing that I don't get is, how are you totally cut off from the "general population" if you still interact with these kids in sports, elective courses, gym, outside of school, at parties, friends of friends, etc etc... I don't see how having magnet type programs in NYC totally cuts a child off from being exposed to dead beats. If anything, magnet schools (or a quasi-magnet program which it sounds like you're in), just throw the above average/average kids in with the worst of the population like Seanx4 mentioned. That sucks, IMHO.
2) See above. The elite programs in NYC sell out the majority of the students to protect a very few handful of bright kids. It's truly a dysfunctional system, it's cut-throat to the extreme and damaging to most of the city schools. A few of the students I went to college with that were alumni at the top NYC schools were honestly the coldest, no personality, most mechanical people I've ever met.
Also I'm with OBH in that AP classes at suburban schools do NOT stink - that's absurd. You have no idea what you're talking about. Anyone can take them but that's like saying anyone can apply to Yale, so Yale stinks - Ridiculous.
1) Well, we have "Houses", so most of our classes are in certain wings of the school with members of our house. We have the Honors House, Culinary House, Business House, Medical Technology House, and a few other houses that I can't recall off the top of my head. They have a program just for kids in the zoned area that just does the basic curriculum, but I don't know if they call it something fancy.
And yeah, we do mix with the regular "zoned" kids for gym and lunch (though for our electives, I think they try to keep them seperate from the kids in actual "Houses"), but it's only for 1 period per day. For everything else, you're not mixing with the deadbeats.
Plus, in gym, it helps that half the zoned kids don't even show up (seriously, if they don't show up, you're not interacting with them)
I mean, you could interact with the regular kids after school or whatever, but me and most of my friends don't really know of anybody who has any serious problems (either home life or academically). We're not snobby or anything but to my knowledge, most of our friends are within our houses (unless we have old friends from middle school, but even then most people go into the same House as their friends. I mean it's natural to be friends with somebody who shares your interests)
2) See above. The kids who are at least average are going to be placed into one House or another, so essentially the only kids who lose out are those at "the bottom of the barrel", and I don't think there's really much that can be done except split them up into smaller classes so they can hopefully get more individualized attention.
Test scores are ONE big factor but not the only one..
I graduated from a magnet HS in Queens and my husband graduated from a local public school (Baldwin HS). We compared our experiences often and its amazing how different they were. My best friend in high school moved to Levittown and we used to talk on the phone every night during our junior year and we would compare academic experiences at her school (MacArthur HS) vs mine..
It was really night and day. The posted above hit the nail on the head - NYC really keeps the bright students in a "bubble", I was in honors/AP courses my jr and sr years and didnt have courses with regular kids unless it was a gym class or some random elective like Speech class, etc. The honors kids rarely hung out with the regular kids and the regular kids rarely hung out with the Special Ed kids..
My husband said his school had a tracking system similar to the one described in the movie ""Waiting for Superman" (which I recommend everyone watch, it was very educational) where there were 4 tracks for all incoming freshman (1) smart kids going into AP/Honors, (2) regular average kids in Regents classes to earn a Regents diploma, (3) the slower kids in Special Ed, and (4) kids not interested in anything academic but wanted to be mechanics, etc (Auto Body Shop, Home Economics being popular courses, etc).
It would be a little crazy to compare NYC with LI because the school districts are all uneven and have different programs/standards and even schedules. I only remember feeling angry because my best friend in Levittown was in AP English and had read 6 Shakespeare plays by the end of her junior year whereas my class (also AP English) had only managed to get past 2 plays because we had some "slower" students in our group and the teacher catered to them.. I was also very angry to discover her school offered AP Latin, AP German, and AP French/Spanish - my school offered these courses only every OTHER year because my high school simply didnt have enough interested/qualified students to make the 20 min count to have a class started..In my graduation year, there were only THREE students who sat for the AP French exam (and at the time, my transcript could only say "Honors French- highest level" because my school didnt offer AP French) and I was 1 of those 3 students who managed to qualify for the AP French exam (never mind the fact that I bombed and got a 2 because my French teacher wasn't good at making sure conversational french was a priority for the AP exam but thats neither here nor there)..
The funny thing about all this is that college admissions has a process to level this playing field. Since we had such a crappy academic curriculum, we had practically everyone in the top 10% of my class accepted into Ivy league colleges and 95% of those in the top 1/2 were accepted to all 4 SUNY Centers in NY State...whereas my friend in Levittown who had a higher GPA/SAT score than me was REJECTED from my alma mater (SUNY Binghamton) because 80% of her graduating class applied and the University could only accept a certain percentage of applicants...same deal with Ivies - the cut off GPA for Cornell at MacArthur was something like a 97.6 given there were probably 60 students who had GPAs above 95.0, but my HS classmate with a 93.2 GPA was accepted with no trouble, since Cornell did not have as many applicants from my HS as from MacArthur in Levittown).
Suffice to say, I would say student demographics and wealth have a larger role to play in determining how great a school district is..Unfortunately. NYC fails by most accounts with the exception of the specialized schools (Stuyvestant) or the very few who still have great programs (Cardozo amd Townsend Harris in Queens).
Last edited by LegalDiva; 12-12-2011 at 11:45 PM..
I can’t directly prove some of the things that are being asked of me—and that’s a fair enough hole in my argument. Despite my cheekiness, I respect the other side but I vehemently disagree with the “reformist” view of education, which I feel homogenizes, fails to recognize true excellence, is excessively egalitarian, and engages in too much “hand-holding.” (particularly in the older grades). Where are our future leaders going to come from if (many) suburban public schools continue with this “everyone wins; nobody loses” attitude ? (to quote another poster in another thread).
Nonetheless, I do know (and another poster acknowledged) that suburban schools do not have objective standards: and that anyone can take AP if they really want to. NO matter what happens in the class, this makes AP far too egalitarian, and eliminates it’s original purpose: to allow the truly extraordinary student go the extra mile.
Is it any wonder America is “falling behind” the rest of the world educationally? The countries ahead of us are the ones that still practice “reward for effort and ability” educational tracking, which allows the truly excellent to shine, even while providing universal education for all. This model was ruined by the 1960s reformers (who cut their teeth around 1900 with Dewey)---and we’re in quicksand. The reformers (nearly) always get their way, American education continues to lag behind—but instead of abandoning silly “reforms” we order more of the same. And we sink and sink.
Here’s some articles which I think may be of interest, whether you agree with my argument or not:
How suburban parents in Virginia want their children’s grades to be inflated:
Bottom line: I believe (many) suburban public schools neither cultivate nor reward true achievement, nor do they prepare students for the realities of the workplace. When a suburban public school teacher is pressured to “re-give a test “ because the class’ scores were too low, I would suggest to at least consider the ramifications on our social fabric, and our nation’s future.
Location: An Island off the coast of North America
449 posts, read 1,132,664 times
Reputation: 119
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pequaman
You can't be serious with this.. You never heard of blacks fighting with other black kids for any number of reasons, like this major one> black vs light-skin blacks or black vs Mulatto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ??
I hope you don't take this as bullying, but you seem like you're still wet behind the ears on this issue. Telling me that someone punched you in the face does not mean you were bullied. Unless we know the entire story. Did they overhear you calling your entire student body "kids that dress like they just came out of jail in Lindenhurst (or) white tra*h?" ... maybe that had something to do with the punch in the face?
I was punched in the face in a MASSAPEQUA School because I have red hair. No one in Lindy has hurt me at all.
Oh and no I did not know that were fights between light-skinned and darker skinned blacks.
.
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) that ---whatever Long Island district you're in---if the parent makes a big enough stink, they will let any child in any AP class.
(seriously, if they don't show up, you're not interacting with them)
I was also very angry to discover her school offered AP Latin, AP German, and AP French/Spanish - my school offered these courses only every OTHER year because my high school simply didnt have enough interested/qualified students to make the 20 min count to have a class started..In my graduation year, there were only THREE students who sat for the AP French exam (and at the time, my transcript could only say "Honors French- highest level" because my school didnt offer AP French) and I was 1 of those 3 students who managed to qualify for the AP French exam (never mind the fact that I bombed and got a 2 because my French teacher wasn't good at making sure conversational french was a priority for the AP exam
but thats neither here nor there)..
