Rude Awakening

Renaissance Academy will graduate its first senior class in exactly 25 days and I have begun to worry that they are not even remotely prepared to take on the real world. We are supposed to be a college preparatory school and I believed it, at first. But when I started working with the senior class on college applications and things of that nature, I started to panic. The highest SAT score in the school was a 1080, and that 's for all three sections of the exam. I remember my own classmates in high school sobbing hysterically about having a score like that because it meant they wouldn't be able to get into the school they had hoped and that was when we only took the math and verbal sections. We also had 18 of our 39 seniors take the biology HSA last week because they still needed to pass it. It's APRIL of their graduating year and nearly half of them still haven't passed this test?

And then there were the bridge projects: a good idea in theory but a nightmare in practice. There have been multiple incidents of students paying their classmates to do them, teachers doing the projects for students, and plagiarism of accepted projects. Everyone is getting desperate and panicking because a low graduation rate for our first senior class would be devastating to everyone involved.

But are they really ready for the next step? The expectations have been lowered so many times to accommodate the vast rates of failing students that I don't think we have adequately prepared them to succeed on their own. We lowered the passing score to a 60. We give students who don't even attend class a 50. We give bridge projects if they can't pass the HSA even though there is no way to prove that the students themselves have learned anything from the projects at all. We send the message that if something is difficult, it's not worth trying because eventually, they will make it easier. Life will not make it easier.

Are they really prepared for college as we promised they would be? We practically threw a party for Mr. 1080-on-the-SAT but that score isn't anywhere close to what he would need to get in to the schools he initially wanted to (Princeton, Georgetown). Though he is certainly the most gifted student in the school, he is also one of the most immature and I worry that we have inflated his abilities so much that when he does go off to college in the fall, it will eat him alive. And he is our best and brightest. What's going to happen to all the others that have been very successful within our small school but just don't stack up nationally or even regionally?

Our seniors are in for a rude awakening.