EDITORIAL RAISING THE BAR SHOULD THE LAUSD ADOPT UC STANDARDS?THE Los Angeles school The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is an academic movement emerged during the mid-1980s, loosely based at the University of Southern California and UCLA, that poses a challenge to the dominant Chicago School of Urbanism. board is considering whether to require all of its students to complete all of the minimum classes needed to be eligible for admission in the University of California The University of California has a combined student body of more than 191,000 students, over 1,340,000 living alumni, and a combined systemwide and campus endowment of just over $7.3 billion (8th largest in the United States). system. ``We have to set high expectations,'' says board President Jose JOSE Jealous One's Still Envy (song) JOSE Joint Optics Structures Experiment Huizar. Amen to that. Raising the bar is a good thing. But is this the right bar to raise at this time? Consider that more than half of all LAUSD LAUSD Los Angeles Unified School District (Los Angeles, CA) students don't even graduate - that is, they drop out - under the current standards. Then consider that less than half of the district's 10th-graders can even pass the High School Exit Exam, which only demands mastery of 10th-grade and earlier material. Requiring more students do to college-prep work, when what they sadly still need is ``high-school prep,'' seems a recipe for more grade inflation or, worse yet, more dropouts. By all means, the district needs to prepare as many students as possible for college. But symbolically raising the bar must not take precedence The order in which an expression is processed. Mathematical precedence is normally: 1. unary + and - signs 2. exponentiation 3. multiplication and division 4. over actually raising performance. |
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