Posted on 02/24/2004 5:10:39 PM PST by Kzoo Knight
Who knows of any high schools that require all students to take semester courses of chemistry, physics, biology, and earth science in 9th and 10th grades? I've heard of schools that cover all four disciplines in 9th grade, which still allows three years for the more serious student to take more in-depth courses in each core science. But I've not been able to find schools teaching a semester-only curriculum.
Public schools in Portage Michigan are abandoning their college preparatory curriculum in favor of mandatory semesters for everyone, and many parents are upset, not just because the 9th and 10th grade curriculum appears to be "dumbed down", but also because the only courses available to honors students in 11th and 12th grade are 2-year IB-HL courses, which means those students will graduate with five semesters of one type of science but only one semester of the others (unless they double up and forfeit other classes). Not exactly the broad background I'd want for my kid, and not even enough to be accepted to most engineering schools. Sounds like an educational experiment that may turn out to be a "fad", yet the Portage Schools are using NCLB to justify this change even though they present no data to justify it.
More information is posted on the PPQE web site at www.portagescience.org (check out the summary of the January 26 Board of Education meeting), but what I'm interested in is "where else are they doing this?" Please post if you know of any other schools doing this.
Thank you.
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