Sped up on the academic “fast track”

Scott Warnock,

I guess this is it going forward. My kids are older, and now I have all this experience, and if you’re careful that sometimes goopy experience stuff will leak out, hit the air, and become… advice!

You don’t want to be a nuisance, but for potentially type-A young parent friends, I want to help them by saying: So much of it doesn’t matter!

Way back to my second-ever post here, “My Kid Plays Up” (in September 2010!), I’ve thought about over-striving to advance kids’ experiences.

I get it. We want our kids to be the best of the best of the best. But I’ve seen enough extravagant early efforts to have a kid climb to the top of the heap at the cost of everyone’s sanity that in the long run didn’t pay themselves back in productive–or healthy–ways. If you’re all enjoying the ride, go for it, but I’ve too often seen that parent-centered hyperachievement when kids are young doesn’t matter when they’re older.

I recently considered this from a school/academic perspective after reading a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Becky Supiano: “The Crumbling Boundary Between High School and College.” (I hope the link works for you.) Supiano asks a fundamental question: Why do so many students who “have taken college-level courses in high school” have such a tough time in college “with the basic components of their academic work”?

With programs like AP and dual credit, we’ve created a “fast track” in academics, she says, that might appear a win-win-win for students, parents, and schools, and it can be. But there are downsides. For instance–and I can relate to this as a writing teacher–accelerated programs condition high school students to write in formulaic ways (five-paragraph essay, I’m looking at you), because teachers spend less time “on different forms of reading and writing.” Earning AP credit with canned, formulaic essays scored with rigid scales is unlike most grade-based college course environments, Supiano points out, noting also that actual college courses are often taught by people with tremendous subject matter expertise.

Also, the ubiquity of AP and dual enrollment in high school and their accompanying pressures play a significant role in shaping students’ sense of what college is–and what it’s for. Students and teachers end up on that fast track that neither of them built but instead was developed by a combination of policymakers focused on efficiency and affordability, schools looking to remain attractive, and parents worried about admissions and tuition, Supiano writes: This motivational brew has led to 75% of public schools offering advanced or dual enrollment courses.

Blurring boundaries between high school and college work “can leave students with a diminished experience of both,” Supiano says, noting that observers agree that even rigorous college-level high school work isn’t the same as being a college student. Shaun Vecera, who directs the University of Iowa’s honor program, says of the college credit for AP work, “I think we have to ask ourselves: What is it that we’re giving the credit for?”

Sure, some kids need a challenge so they’re not bored (or disruptive), and advanced courses can be especially beneficial for students who don’t compete on an equal playing educational field. Dual credit also can reduce the number of courses a student must take in college, a sometimes significant cost savings. But where is the tipping point at which so many students take advanced programming in high school that it really is no longer “advanced”? 

Melinda Karp, founder of Phase Two Advisory, which works with colleges to improve student success, argued in her 2005 dissertation on dual enrollment (which she called “a policy without a theory”) that dual enrollment and AP were seen as avenues for boosting college access and completion and for making them more equitable, but that was complicated because students must be deemed college-ready to participate in those programs in the first place.

At the same time, Karp says, research on community colleges made it apparent that college readiness is multifaceted. “Being college-ready is not just, Can you do calculus and English?” Karp says; a host of skills, including metacognitive skills, enable students to complete work successfully, and a student might be college-ready in some ways but not others, including for certain courses.

Supiano suggests that maybe in high school “students acquire knowledge” and in college “they start to create it.” She ends her article by saying things that might look good to admissions offices are not necessarily what professors want and “some are even at cross-purposes.” But students won’t know that until they get to college. “By then, they’re on a path and in a hurry,” she says, and once on the fast track, there may be little time to think about why they’re in college at all.

 

 

Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.
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