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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem is that way too many school in poor communities are spending almost all their resources on the poorest performing students and the most neediest instead of spending money on bright promising low socio-economic students. Those bright students are getting shortchanged.

When California created the Master Plan for Higher Education the intention was:

UC Eligibility: Limited to the top 12.5% of high school graduates.
CSU Eligibility: Limited to the top 33.3%
Community Colleges: Open to anyone "capable of benefiting from instruction

So in poor high schools, the top 1/8 to 1/3 of students were in honors classes because schools were preparing them for 4 year colleges. UC/Cal States decided on specific course completions called "A-G requirements" (a-2 years social science; b- 4 years English; c-4 years recommended math, etc); d- Science (2 years, 3 recommended) – Lab sciences-  Biology, Chemistry, or Physics, etc.

20 years ago CA created this ridiculous push that ALL students should meet A-G requirements. So instead of taking electives like auto shop or consumer math that would lead to a job in the trades they push almost all students to take physics, chemistry and algebra/geometry/algebra 2.

Then these school took away true honors classes and renamed on level classes "honors for all", which completely drags down honors classes for students who want to be in school and do well.

So now students like the one profiled in this article who can't pass remedial math are getting accepted to UCs because they got lucky and had teachers who were easy graders and/or are in schools with countless retakes and/or have teachers who look the other way when they cheat.

So the brilliant student are really, really losing out. And despite some people thinking smart kids don't exist in poor schools. They do! But they get ignored.  I work in an elementary school that is all Latino and poor. I was looking at records and I saw a 5th grade student who received a perfect score on the Smarter Balance Test CA gives all students in the spring. At the end of 4th grade his score was 2700, which is in the 99+percentile rank. His parents don't speak English well and he gets no outside enrichment.

So what does he get at this elementary school? Absolutely nothing extra. On his report card his teacher wrote he needed to work on helping other students and being a team player since he is strong in math. [/quote]

Less than 50% of CA HS students complete the A-G requirements necessary for a UC.[/quote]

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