Reply to Anyone else educated by FCPS and sees the decline?

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Reply to "Anyone else educated by FCPS and sees the decline?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would love to know the graduation rates in fcps per high school over the last 30 years. [/quote]

Why?  They’ve made it easier to graduate in recent years while reducing what’s needed to graduate. [/quote]
This is correct. There are many factors which go into graduation requirements. In addition to standard units of credit, there are also requirements for verified credits, which require passing the associated SOL in order to get course credit. For students entering high school in 2018-19 & beyond, Virginia reduced the number of verified credits needed to get a standard diploma from six to five and reduced the verified credits needed for an advanced diploma from nine to five. This was done as part of a generalized effort to de-emphasize standardized testing and also to allow more students who fail their SOLs to still get credit for the course and be able to count the course toward their graduation requirements. Thus, some kids who might not have graduated given SOL failures, are now able to graduate due to these changes. Virginia also reduced the minimum passing score needed for math SOLs in 2018-19 and reading SOLs in 2019-20. Lots of lowering the bar in recent years. [/quote]

That "lowering the bar" followed "raising the bar" too high before.  It just returned things back to where they were before.

Also, it's pretty hard to 'lower the reqs" of an AP or IB course which has established external standards, or even math courses which have expected content.  Students used to regularly not take Calculus in high school and now they do.  Students used to take a handful of APs, now many take 10.  There's a greater diversity of students in FCPS--socioeconomically, so wider gaps between the groups, but the top quartile of students have increased in the rigor of their courseload over the past 30 years for sure. [/quote]
The prior policy raised the bar too high?  The prior policy limited kids' ability to get graduation credits for a course if they failed the associated SOL. Why isn't that a good thing? You think it's better that kids  can now get graduation credit even if they fail the associated SOL? We should care about what students know and not be indiscriminately graduating kids irrespective of their skill set. It does students no favors if we graduate them and they haven't learned necessary skills.[/quote]

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