jtr

I have attended many higher ed professional conferences in the last 5 years and all of them spent much time talking about how useless AP is now. There was a time when AP was for the top students. Now it seems AP is for everyone and the program has been watered down. Some of the top universities in the U.S. are now not taking AP for college credit. If I'm not mistaken, the representatives from the University of Chicago said they were no longer taking AP courses. There were others who said that their university had done away with it as well. The main point I was making about Westside is, once their kids get to college, they seem to be average at best. Those students are not any more prepared for college than some of the inner city schools. If you read the Chronicle of Higher Education, there are many articles about the declining standards at many universities. The main reason they are having to lower their standards is because high school students going to college are not doing well. At my university, the faculty refuse to offer remedial classes, which makes it difficult to keep enrollment up. More and more students are graduating from high school without the basic skills to succeed in college. It is a sad situation.

North Forest is the worst school district in the area. We rarely enroll students from that district. The last time we received a student from that district was in 1999. North Forest has potential because the students seem eager to learn and they have family support, but the administration and the teaching staff seem to be totally unqualified. The district should be taken over by the state.

In HISD, the schools that send us the best students are Health Professions High School, Lamar, Law Enforcement High school, Waltrip High school, Bellaire High, Reagan, and Davis. Some of these schools may be a surprise to you. We researched our graduates over the last 20 years to see what high schools were sending us students who were graduating from college within 4 years and we found that students from these HISD schools had the highest college graduation rates for our university. All of this research was done to help figure out a way to improve our graduation rates. Believe it or not, the best students in the survey were Home Schooled students. They out perform everyone, even the elite private school students.

The difference may be in income, but in terms of preparation for college, neither Lee nor Westside do a good job. This, of course, is based on historical data at my university. Obviously we have more historical data for Lee, but since Westside has been open the quality of students we have received has been quite low.

I have worked for a local university in the Admissions office for many years, and I can tell you that Lee high has not had a good academic reputation since maybe the 70's. People who say that the opening of West Side High was the cause of the decline of Lee could not be more wrong. Lee High has been bad for quite some time, and West Side is not much better in terms of preparing students for college. West Side looks nice because its new, but the teachers and students are the same people who would have been at Lee High.