Reply to Banneker versus School Without Walls

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Banneker versus School Without Walls"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, so have you opted your kid(s) our of the PARCC in DCPS? I do so every year, because PARCC is a poorly written, unnecessarily lengthy, widely discredited corporate 10-hour test given to 8 year-olds, crafted and graded by a British company vs. an American one.

The SAT has been around since 1926, helping tens of millions of low and moderate-income students prove their value to elite colleges through four or five generations. You can throw the baby out with the bathwater because Banneker students don't get the prep to collectively shine on the SAT, or you can see the forest for the trees.

Test optional doesn't mean that the SAT, or ACT, has been rejected by academe.  It means a decent score can only enhance an application.  I don't know of any colleges that won't permit an applicant to submit a favorable SAT score with an application, do you?[/quote]
It’s EXTREMELY disingenuous not to acknowledge that the SAT was created by a eugenicist as a way to support only allowing white people to immigrate to the US.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/history-sat-reflects-systemic-racism-opinion[/quote]

LOL it's EXTREMELY ahistorical and ignorant to say the SAT was about only letting white people immigrate. You know the restrictionists in the early 20th century were trying to keep out Eastern European Catholics and Jews, right? And Bruce Hammond is a hack, not a historian. Read a book. [/quote]

It's EXTREMELY disingenuous not to acknowledge that high school and college admissions tests are systematically used all over the world. This is the case because such tests are useful for identifying the academic preparedness of prospective students. 
[/quote]

+1.  Grade inflation is rampant, courses are dumb down.  It’s difficult to really assess what students know, and if they will be prepared for college.

This is where standardized tests come in.  Same basic knowledge test administered to everyone.  The SAT, as previous posters have said, are testing basic knowledge you should have learned in high school.  It’s not testing things you don’t know.

Yes, test prep is out there.  Millions of kids take the SAT but really only a small percentage do test prep courses like Kaplan, etc….  It’s really a false narrative, the people on here saying majority of kids that do well on the SAT are test prep.

I’m a minority who immigrated here when I was 4 and grew up poor.  My parents bought a SAT study book and that was what I did.  It costs maybe $20?   Did fine in the SAT and got a full academic scholarship to college.

It’s not because of lack of test prep that Banneker kids don’t do well.  It’s because DCPS refuses to do tracking to identify early in elementary the lower SES kids with potential, to then challenge them moving forward to reach their full potential. The kids coming to Banneker are mostly from poorly performing schools with no rigor or high performing peer group.  By high school, it’s too late for them to plug in all the gaps in their knowledge or correct a weak foundation in math, reading, writing, vocab, etc…

I knew no English when I started K and had ESL pull outs. I did well in school because teachers saw I had potential early on, and I was put in G & T in 3rd grade.  From there, I was tracked with a higher performing peer group and had more challenging content and materials.

AA kids from low SES backgrounds like myself in DC just gets lost in the system.  They usually are in poorly performing schools with no rigor or high performing peer groups.  Then they get to Banneker, and by then it’s too late and a catch up game just to get 500 on the SAT and 3’s on AP tests.  It also doesn’t help how low a bar DCPS sets.

What DCPS needs to do is establish G & T schools at the elementary level, magnet schools at the middle school level.  But that will never happen because it’s all about social promotion in the name of equity and a race to the bottom.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics