– Chris the Producer writes:

I first and foremost want to thank Dori Monson. I enjoyed working with him and had a great time working on the show. He is a great guy to work with and a terrific host. Phil will be back next week starting Monday and this will be my last blog posting. I also want to thank you for reading my posts and giving me heads up on some great stories.

Now to the story. Are we raising the high school bar too far? That is the question I had when I read this article.

The Seattle Times reported today that Roosevelt High School will make a huge move toward a curriculum that will prepare students for college. Roosevelt High will start making all sophomore students take Advanced Placement (AP) classes next year. For anyone that is not familiar with AP courses, they are classes that are taken by high school students and cover material at a pace similar to that of college courses. The curriculum of the course is also reviewed to make sure that the students are being given college level courses. At the end of the class the students are then able to take a comprehensive test that will go over all of the topics brought up during the course. If the student does well enough in the class the student will then earn college credit for their work that can transfer to the college they attend after high school.

These courses are designed to challenge a student in their thinking and in the ways they learn. A great way for students who are gifted or students that want a challenge to obtain college credit and push their own learning limits. However these courses are not for everyone, and even those that choose to attend these classes sometimes fail.

I for one think that every student needs to be challenged in their learning. In high school there were classes that were not challenging. I’ll admit that I took some of those classes to have a lighter class load. Other times I challenged myself and took advanced classes and when I was able I joined the Running Start program.

The whole time however, I knew of peers that were not able to perform academically on the level that I could. This isn’t to say that these students were stupid. On the contrary one of them is the smartest person that I know. It was more along the lines that they did not learn the same way others did in the traditional sense. Some were more mechanically inclined. Others could draw a masterpiece, but couldn’t solve basic math problems in school. These students weren’t dumb, but different. They were challenged with the normal classes, and with these life examples I begin to have a problem with this new academic precedent.

From Roosevelt High’s view point I can understand that they are trying to raise the academic standards in their schools. I agree that we need to raise the academic standards in schools, but to college levels? I don’t think we need to set up a whole slew of students to fail.

I firmly believe that this will be a huge failure of the school and a failure to the students. While students need to understand that they must put in hard work, research and time into every project they work on in school. I don’t think that we need to set standards that are impossible for many students to achieve. The AP level of high school work should set a bar that is high enough for the ones that need the challenge, but is this a bar that a regular student can pass? I don’t think it should be.

There are one of two things that is happening here. Either we are bringing the AP standard down in order to allow all students to achieve the advanced curriculum or we set the bar too high and have a large number of students fail out of the class. Neither option is a good option in my opinion. High school is supposed to prepare students for college or the working world. If high school is not preparing students for these two options then we do have a major issue with the high school curriculum. I just don’t think making everyone take college level classes is the correct way to raise the curriculum.