A certain
Slashdot comment did come to mind when I saw this thread.
Congrats in being in the top 1% of all humans, but not everyone is up to that challenge or is that smart. Most kids are just average, so the school system must best prepare those average students for college. Of course, a system must also have ways at appealing the "elite" of society and offer them such things as AP classes.
The problem is that the "elite" courses like AP have really become watered down. I've been in AP classes where people have zero work ethic and lack the talent to pull off a grade without investing that effort, then complain about how tough the class in when they've invested nothing and chose to take an AP class. The teacher can either continue teaching the class at the same rate, leaving the slackers behind, or slow things down and not finish all of the course material in time for the AP test. And when the teacher is getting phone calls from ten parents complaining about how their kid isn't passing the class, which do you think the teacher is going to choose?
Fortunately, AP Calculus did not suffer from this problem, and neither did AP Physics and Chem, for the most part. But Biology and Statistics were absolutely rife with students who were both unmotivated and unprepared for the subject material. (It should go without saying that any liberal arts classes were majorly comprised of such individuals.)
There used to be a time when CP classes really were considered "college-prep." The top 10% of the class would take AP, and those in the 60th percentile or above would take CP classes. However, CP classes have become seriously watered down, evidenced by the fact that our district wants to make "CP English" the baseline for freshmen next year, completely eliminating "General English."
I don't wish to appear antisocial here (even though I'm less sociable than most, admittedly), but there is a growing view of school as a place to socialize. This view is a plague; it distracts students from their goal of learning and is an affront to the very ideals of education.
If it weren't for socialization, most of the extra-ciricular activities that I took part in during high school would be dead. At least half of the people who ended up staying around for the entire year joined because of a friend (and ended up staying because they genuinely enjoyed the activity). The entire speech and debate team is a very cohesive social group and it's a place where you stand to benefit a lot from your peers. Larger speech and debate teams in our league tend to do best not necessarily because there's an increased probability that they contain more talented individuals, but because of how a strong speechie-culture can motivate students within the program to excel.
Anyway, the problems that I've observed with K-12 education are mainly the result of where I grew up during my school years. It's an area mostly based on agriculture. When I say that it's agrarian, I don't mean that everyone there is a farmer, but a vast, vast majority of the area's workforce is employed by food-producers. There are a lot of people who are engineers, mechanics, microbiologists, and the like, but they're mostly employed by the local winery (the biggest local employer) or Frito-Lay. It seems that young folks in this are have zero ambition. A tiny, infinitesimally small fraction of my graduating class even applied to out of state schools, and a startlingly high number of really bright kids are attending the community college this fall. I'm talking about kids who are doing the AP route, have a 4.0+ GPA, and participated in all kinds of school activities. The class valedictorian from one of our city's better schools is attending community college this fall.
The consensus among my peers seems to be that they want to stay within driving distance of home, which is pretty silly inasmuch as we live on the west coast.
