Reply to Five Ivy League colleges vie for DC student (Banneker HS)

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Five Ivy League colleges vie for DC student (Banneker HS)"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Good God, all of the tit-for-tat on white versus black.  Why don't we call a spade a spade here: I was excited to read this article because it's rare to find a young, black male, growing up in a poor, crime-ridden area and attending a sub-par school where the dropout and graduation rates are well beyond acceptable, succeed against those odds and be accepted to not one but five Ivy League schools.  Good for him for persevering.  He's a good-news story for Banneker, for the colleges who have accepted him, and, most importantly, for himself.[/quote]

+1000 except the sub-par school, maybe generally sub-par school system.  What more is there to say, really some people on DCUM love misery and are plain racist. [/quote]

Banneker is our "stem" school, but the avg SAT score is below the national avg.  It is also admission only, and 99% AA.  So..... not really possible for kids of any other race to go there, does not look like from the SATs that the kids are all that smart/educated, and it is ranked in US News & World report very very low - type it in, see what you get.  The one thing that seems good about this story is that the kid appears like he will be able to hack it in the Ivies although they did not mention what his actual standardized test scores were, but obviously the IB program there cannot possibly be that rigorous or the school would be ranked higher, the SATs would be higher, and the exmissions in general would be better.  So I hope he actually can hack it - spelling bees are ultimately about memorizing the spelling of numerous arcane antediluvian words that are no longer in our lexicon, not about intelligence.  While people can argue whether SATs measure intelligence, Banneker and SWW's DC CAS scores are fantastic but their ratings nationally suck so we know DC CAS is irrelevant.  I just hope he can rapidly compensate for his poor education.  I had a lot of friends come in to Princeton having been admitted as Engineers only to realize that they were so far behind they could never catch up, or that they really did not have natural talent they just thought so because they were in a crappy school and they were the best there...............

The most important thing I ever did as a Princeton students was be part of a sit in where we demanded a 9th semester of financial aid - so many of these kids come unprepared without realizing it, get paralyzed and fail out, and at the time if they dropped out to avoid having the grades on their transcript or flunked a lot of classes there was no way for them to come back financially. We changed that.

But I hope the summer program they offer now to high risk kids (kids from bad high schools, mostly minority, and athletes who got recruited for athletics not academics) is better on education.  It certainly gave people a community to commiserate with, but not that many solutions at the time for what really turned out to be shitty educations - not knowing how to write 5 paragraph essays, analyze text, do research, cite sources, much less go from their precalculus classes to calculus at Princeton.

That being said, I hear the AP exams are a lot harder now - don't know if it is true - but if it was it would give the schools and the kids another way to evaluate whether or not they were prepared for an Ivy League school.  A lot would have benefited from a post senior year at a good school but it wasn't as if they could pay for it.  Many rich kids did it to get IN to good colleges after having messed up in high school, but I never heard of any of my friends doing anything - even going to community college might not have been such a bad idea...........[/quote]

This kid did IB courses. And the IB exams are graded outside this country - in Europe.  SO, it does not matter which school they go to in the US, their papers are being graded by impartial graders outside this country.  That is precisely the reason, IB kids have to work so hard because they are not adhering to the standards of the education system here.  And AP is easy compared to IB.

He will not be needing remedial courses in any Ivy League college he chooses - and that's why they are offering him scholarships.  He is more than capable and the college will not have to waste time, energy, money to get him up to par.

IF he was a rising sports star and got admissions in the Ivy colleges based on his skills in the sports arena, it would have been more palatable to the haters. To think he made it because of his academic merit is killing these jealous cats![/quote]

Ivies don't offer merit scholarships. His are purely needs-based.[/quote]

He was offered admission because of his academic merit, and he was offered scholarships because of need.  People are jealous because they are used to seeing many AA students celebrated and getting into colleges because of their sports skills, and being offered need-based scholarships.

[/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