bestowed honor roll or high honor roll to 686 students in the fourth quarter of the most recent school year.
The enrollment is listed as 890 this year on the WIAA website, meaning about three-quarters of the students were on that special list.
Honor rolls are similarly swelled in many suburban communities. had 221 seniors on last fall semester’s honor roll; the entire high school has about 1,500 students. ’s list from the previous fourth quarter rolled on for 17 pages and about 800 names on an enrollment of about 2,000.
A survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA revealed last year that 45 percent of incoming college freshmen carried an “A” average in high school — yet spent less time on homework than any class in the 25 years of the survey.
Conversely, greater competition for college admission and for jobs also means a greater — and earlier — emphasis on preparation than ever. The advent of 4K — not to mention suburban helicopter parents who drill their children on reading and math before they are walking — are just two factors that suggest more kids are groomed for success.
So is the booming high school honor roll a reflection of better information and preparation? Or is it simply the product of a toothless evaluation system where every child is above average? Vote in our poll and participate in the discussion in our comments section.
As to the advice for November: we need to "Stay the Course" with President Obama. Turn off the tube; read; reflect; and realize that morally and ethically this Nation will be at its worst if Romney and Ryan ever were given any more power than they already have. Re-elect Obama
Invest in your own children's social and cognitive development with your own love and time and get your family the heck out of the inner city as fast as you possibly can.
Anybody with teens knows that they have to compete much harder than before to vie for admission into top schools. Perhaps in the 70s less kids tried to apply to these schools and more kids opted for trade schools, IDK. I will tell you it is truly much more competitive now. My friends joke that we wouldn't have gotten into college now with how little studying we did "back in the day". Talk to the guidence staff or college prep teachers - the hoops kids have to jump through now is way more than we had to: grades, leadership, jobs, volunteering, sports/music. Perhaps this is just more reflective of the North Shore. No lie but when I volunteered with first graders I heard six year olds talking about wanting to go to Harvard when they grew up. Honestly, our schools are great but the families are the main influence and set the tone by example. The apples don't fall far from the trees!
I really don't think students are all that challenged in secondary schools. Back in the day; most of us also participated in volunteer work, sports programs and work. We didn't get any breaks with our academic performance because of outside activities.
While that worked well for the relative, I have to reflect that this is yet another symptom of the uneven playing field. Another MPS student without an extracurricular activity may not have had the same opportunity.
There is a lot of pressure on these kids - why burn them out by making sure there are enough C's to make YOU happy? Especially when the kids have shown they have mastered the material in class.
Why the judgement? All I have said is that kids work harder today than kids did in the past so they deserve to be rewarded. This certainly does not pertain to schools that just "pass" kids, obvi, but it does pertain to schools that expect achievement. I think most people from high-achieving schools would agree. I never said my family is crazed just that they have to try a little harder to get into the same types of colleges my husband and I got into. The environment today is much more competetive - look ---you have 4 year olds in organized sports! I never said I agree with this - I just said it exists. I am simply acknowleging that aspect.
Take your own advice. Read the thread again and see who went off track. As for the rest of your questions, my kids attend Marquette and Xavier, they worked hard and played hard, but they never played their parents for a fool. At any time my kids were over tired, we addressed the problem and found the source to be other than school work.