It is certainly my experience that males are very underrepresented in my AP classes; one year, only 11 of 76 students were male.

I sincerely doubt that reading ability was a determining factor, because: 1) this is an AP class, after all, and all of the students were recommended by their 9th grade English teachers; 2) the assignment was to write questions, rather than to exhibit understanding; and, 3) most importantly, most of my Asian-American students are not native-English speakers, and have lower reading test scores, etc, than my African-American students, yet they almost universally complete the assignment.

Can you recheck your records and determine how many of the 19 that did the assignment were female?

Built in assumption is that all 44 African American students could read the text of Guns, Germs and Steel and the assignment was not a test of reading ability but reflects motivation to do the assignment.

Jim Mordecai

The better course is to give them a program which identifies what they are good at and maximizes that.

I think we largely agree:

1. I dont care about the year-end tests, because they test little of value — they test knowledge, rather than analysis (at least the state social studies tests do that). I also have a certain degree of freedom in that regard: I teach seniors and AP World (to sophomores). Seniors do not take the state tests, and AP World covers a completely different time period than do the state 10th grade World History standards. But I am in the minority. Most teachers worry about the tests, and so they worry about “covering” everything. So, they dont take the time to ask students to write about and think deeply about topics. If the standards were narrower, teachers would feel more free to ask students to analyze in depth. That seems to be what happens in Japan re: math, by the way. See http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun98/depth.html

2. You say: “To learn and explain the differences between the different philosophies socialism, fascism, communism, monarchies, parliamentary systems, and constitutional liberal democracies influence economic policies, social welfare policies, and human rights practice, is not simply fact based, it’s understanding the content.” And yet, the state tests say there is only one answer to a question about the effect of liberal democracy on human rights. So, the textbook says “liberal democracy had XYZ effect on human rights.” A student who memorizes that will get a good grade on the test, but does that student “understand” the effect? I doubt it. Wouldn’t you rather that I ask your daughter, “Defend or refute the following: ‘The development of the norm of human rights was the inevitable result of the rise of liberal democracy in the West.’” A student who writes an essay addressing that prompt will probably end up understanding the standard. However, writing a decent response to that prompt will require understanding of ultimate and proximate causation, contingency, and numerous other concepts. It will also require a good deal of research.

I can’t teach all of that in 2 days, and yet that is all I have if I am to cover all of the standards. (Again, Government classes in high school are 1 semester only; the other semester is Economics). So, something has to give. And, just to give some context: I scored above the 99th percentile on the LSAT. I graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law (UC Berkeley). I dont have a family. So, I am a very smart, very well-educated guy with lots of time to devote to my students, YET I CAN NOT COVER ALL OF THOSE STANDARDS. I am not “making excuses” — I simply don’t know how to do it. So if I can’t do it, how many teachers can? Probably not many. Thus, the breadth of the standards is a serious impediment to the type of learning you’d like to see for your daughter.

3. It is true that OUSD tends to neglect the needs not just of “high end” kids, but also the needs of most kids who are motivated to learn. Our focus on “the achievement gap” means that energies, money, etc, are channeled towards the absolutely worst performing kids, to the detriment of most of the others. That needs to change. But, one way to change it would be to change the standards, and to change the tests, so that they test thinking more and rote memorization less.

Your assumption is that with all students you must decide between “analysis” and “facts.” To learn and explain the differences between the different philosophies
socialism, fascism, communism, monarchies, parliamentary systems, and constitutional liberal democracies influence economic policies, social welfare policies, and human rights practice, is not simply fact based, it’s understanding the content. Proving the ability to analyze the differences would be how the student proves to the teacher, the testing facility and the district that the material is fully analyze and synthesize the material.

Teaching the material as AP material means that you are teaching it as a college course rather than a high school senior course. I believe you are one of the top teachers in the district. I believe you are teaching to high standards. And perhaps my feelings and thoughts come from a parent for an extremely bright child who synthesizes material quickly from a vast number of sources.

While Nextset may make his comments crudely, impatiently or politically incorrectly, the question of teaching the same standard to a student with an IQ of 100, 130 or 155 is a valid question. My daughter’s IQ is above the top end of this range. It is very difficult to find teachers who will truly differentiate or teach students to the highest level of the standards both in content and analysis because we do not allow the students who are able to learn the material to move beyond the class average at best, or the lowest one third of the class usually in the district overall. And while I believe there is some flexibility in IQ, a student whose mind works extremely well, efficiently with a student who is highly motivated to learn is rarely going to function well in classrooms where the learning is targeted to the bottom third, or even the middle third of learners.

When she arrived in kindergarten, we were told to wait until she was tested in third grade and “identified” then the work would be adjusted, it has not been; then we were told to wait until fourth grade because up until then students were learning to read and now they are reading to learn, it has not changed, in fact, the “work” is a repeat of third grade with the exception of learning to fill in worksheets about California history. Now we are being told to wait until middle school for algebra because before then NO children are developmentally ready. In the local middle schools advanced classes are only taught after the regular school day. Now in high school a student must take an AP or college class to be challenged with the State 12th grade standards.

Mr. Danning, I ask you what if it were your child with a high IQ who asked to take the year end exams the first week of school so she could give the school the test scores they want just so she could spend her time actually learning something? What would you do?

The point I’m making is that in public schools such as OUSD, never is heard a discouraging word… When these kids leave they have never had contrasting viewpoints about much of anything. They are indoctrinated. They are physically uncomfortable with any contrary view to what is politically correct. Because of this they are not as competitive and not as mobile in society as they should be.

People can follow whatever doctrine they want to but they – as educated adults – should be familiar with the contrary points of view. Our public school kids are not even aware there is a point of view opposite leftist doctrine and are programmed to regard any who would pose one as mad/bad. This is exactly how China programs their people and may have something to do with the fact they can’t invent much of anything. They are a conformist society that is easily controlled by their government. (A government that would send it’s own children to the USA to study at Ivy League schools – so that they are not as sheepish as the rabble.)

Gordon your post about “The Onion” goes right to my point. It’s not whether or not I like or agree with contrarian view – as an instructor I would mask my own views to a large extent to keep sheepish kids from blindly following in an attempt to brownnose an A. When you teach you are attempting to train these kids to have an analytical approach on everything all the time. The only thing I want them to take on gospel is that part about lying, cheating and stealing.

If you are a public secondary school educator you probably don’t grok this. You are there to indoctrinate whether you realize it or not. This is less so at college level as long as you are in the sciences and not drivel such as black studies and sociology.

Doctrinaire kids are desirable for parking lot attendants and rote work – such as the assembly line and manufacturing jobs we have sent to Asia. They are facing a downward spiral in their standard of living. They are less desirable as service workers. The analytical students are the ones who can better surf the Brave New World. We are facing a period of wrenching change. Some people are going to manage better than others.

The more we discuss education the more you can see how the one size fits all mentality – the “all men are created equal” nonsense – when applied to public school education, trashes the prospects of the left side of the bell curve.

Those students of any color with an IQ of 85 cannot possibly handle this curriculum. Where is the curriculum for them? Why do we not have a clear set of standards for the IQs of 70, 85, 90, 100 and 115 or whatever cutoffs you want to set. Why do we have to set a standard that is higher than half the population can reasonably reach for the pleasure of the right side of the bell curve?

People are different. Some are good at material requiring higher function, some are not. Some play football, some can be engineers and are useless at competitive football. Why do we not have different standards of coursework for the different abilities clustered in the population?

The best way to wreck academic interest in a population is to cram unwanted material down their throats they can’t process until they give up and leave. There is another way to develop what potential that is there and try to keep people out of the prisons. Private schools can ignore these “standards” and the school boards should publicly declare them optionals. It’s nice of the students can handle and absorb all this material. I believe most of the urban students can’t, won’t, and would be better served learning to write business letters and bookkeeping along with survey courses in history and lots more standard english composition and speech.

The list above is just not realistic for lower class students. Also I don’t like the politics of much of it and would be interested to combine some of the leftist indoctrination with right wing indoctrination so the students are familiar with all the issues.

Example: Discuss how the “Treason Lobby” headed by the Kennedy faction of the Democratic Party starting in the early 1960s altered over a Century of immigration policy and flooded the USA with 3rd worlders and through Great Society programs destroyed the great cities of the USA. Explain how Communist infiltration of USA Government (especially the State Dept), Civil Rights Movement and Media assisted in Cold War plans to steal weapons plans & subvert the USA prepatory to a USSR attack on USA. Discuss the Color of Crime and racial differences in criminality. Discuss the failure of Socialism as a viable political or economic concept. Examine how multi-cultural societies such as Malaysia avoid crime and high cost justice with corporal punishment and death penalty…that sort of thing.

There’s plenty of history & policy that the left doesn’t want taught while their version of reality is listed in these “standards”.

The bottom line is that the public schools produce – with these “standards” cited above – leftist indictrinated weak thinkers who are not desirable as workers or citizens.

You mention your opposition to “reducing the pool of knowledge.” Therein lies the root of our disagreement. In social studies, the state sets forth both content standards and analysis standards. There is a tension between covering content and teaching analysis skills, because teaching analysis takes a lot of time. So, would you rather your daughter learn to write an analytical essay, or memorize facts? Would you like to be able to “construct and test hypotheses; collect, evaluate, and employ information from multiple primary and secondary sources; and apply it in oral and written presentations”? So would I, but I can’t teach those skills if I have to cover vast amounts of factual material.

As it happens, I do not cover all of the standards, because I want students to write and to analyze in depth. I teach AP World History, but do I cover everything that will be on the test? Do I give students practice multiple-choice tests, because 1/2 of the test is multiple choice? No. I have them write, and then write some more, and then write more, and I give them lots of instruction on how to analyze evidence, construct theses, etc. As a result, I do not give students all of the knowledge they need to do well on the AP test. On the other hand, here is what a (very bright) student emailed me a while back:

“I’ll be glad to have you know, so far, you are like the best AP teacher that I have come to know of, so I felt compelled to write this email to you. I don’t know how you do it, but you have that weird manner of teaching that I can’t seem to describe, but I think it is mainly due to your vigorous focus on analysis. Your “so what’s” and your “why’s that so important” phrases seem to do the trick to help open up minds, or at least, my mind. Your class is like the only class that stands out in my mind right about now, except for the summer classes that I took at Laney, an introductory statistics class taught by a German female teacher named Ola and a beginning chemistry class taught by some bearded Spanish PhD guy who is an awesome Cornell-notes-lecturer for chemistry (he writes everything on the whiteboard so neatly and clearly and defined, and explains it so pristinely, he plans everything out beforehand. He once took the time out of a lecture to note to us that individuals like him work extra hard so that people who are extra lazy are compelled to work extra hard as well. Those weren’t his exact words, but I think I’ve captured the meaning). Other than these two college courses and your class, I can think of no other class that can really compete with them, except for maybe my 9th grade geometry class with Mr. Sawyer. Well other than that, your class really was a wonderful experience, I have to say. Maybe it was due to your syllabus, which is like a thing virtually nonexistent in all other classes that I know of, and your vigorous enforcement of it. Maybe it was because of your like for the Simpsons or something. But anyways, your class was fun, overall. I just wanted to say all this before I forget about it.”

Unfortunately, there is great pressure to “cover the content standards” because the content standards are tested for No Child Left Behind purposes, and the analysis standards are not tested. So, many teachers skimp on the analysis. So, either the content standards should be reduced, or the State test should assess the analysis standards as well.