In a recent letter to the Milford Daily news several statements and questions were posed as to why one person doesn’t support the school district’s request for additional funding. I’m not going to get into the whole vote for or against thing, that’s up to you. But as a proud mom of a Nipmuc senior I am bewildered by the question regarding achievement.
The question asked was, “Where are the skyrocketing MCAS scores, the large number of students taking and acing AP classes, the admissions to Ivy League schools and the academic scholarships?”
Nipmuc students do very well with obtaining merit (academic) scholarships. For example my daughter, a senior at Nipmuc, was offered over $250,000 in merit (academic) scholarships in total from different Universities. She decided on Suffolk University where she was placed in their honors program and received the highest merit (academic) scholarship Suffolk offers. She will be studying business law and government. She is one of three students (that I am aware of ) from Nipmuc who were accepted to Suffolk’s honors program and awarded their highest academic scholarship.
Just from chatting with my daughter I am aware of several students who were accepted and offered merit (academic) scholarships to attend Northeastern, BU, and BC. One student graduating this year has been notified he can attend Cornell for his sophomore year. Another graduating senior will be attending Babson next year; Babson is only accepting 500 of the 7000 applicants. And that is just naming a few.
Unfortunately I don’t have the stats for this year’s graduating class for merit (academic) scholarships, but I can share some stats from last year’s class…
- For the class of 2014 – 370 AP tests were taken at Nipmuc with 74.4 percent earning qualifying scores. Since 2010 the school has seen a 70 percent increase in the number of students taken AP courses, a 104 percent increase in the number of tests given, a 116 percent increase in the number of AP Scholars.
- Over 90% of the class of 2014 achieved advanced or proficient scores in all areas of MCAS
- Over 2.4 million dollars of scholarship funding were received by the members of the Class of 2014 which had 179 graduates
I would also like to note that every university we visited emphasized their advancements made in innovative learning through technology. Nipmuc and the district need to keep up with innovative learning through technology.
To bash technology in the classroom today would be like bashing purchasing computers in the 80s or saying basic computer programming classes offered in the 80s were a waste of taxpayers money. SMARTboards are industry standard now, even the poorest communities in the commonwealth use SMARTboards and have some type of iPad or similar technology.
Oh, one more … the 3D printer at Miscoe was received on a grant.
submitted by
Jenn Doyle – Upton
Proud Nipmuc Parent
Upton Daily Editor
UPTON DAILY 
From an objective point of view, I think the questions posed from the Milford Daily article weren’t really answered by your op-ed post. In fact, the absence of a satisfying answer to these questions shows what the original questions were intending to communicate: our district still isn’t matching the achievement level of many of our neighboring towns (with similar demographics).
I want to address two of the questions. First, “where are the large number of students taking and acing the AP exams?” Yes, the AP program at Nipmuc has seen a large rise in enrollment over the past few years, but higher enrollment does not directly correlate to higher achievement. We could enroll every student at Nipmuc in “AP classes”, but if the number of students who achieve a a qualifying score remains the same, then there hasn’t been much growth in achievement.
Furthermore, using the metric of “qualifying score” to measure achievement overrepresents how well our district is preparing students for college admissions. As another commenter (@db) stated, many schools do not accept a score of 3 (and in some cases, even 4) as evidence that a student is prepared to skip a particular course. This is despite the fact that the College Board considers anything higher than a 2 to be a “qualifying score”. To be honest, after having gone through many AP courses and now many college courses, I can anecdotally say that AP scores generally correlate to the following letter grades in classes: 5 – A, 4 – B, 3 – C, 2 – D, 1 – F. Rightfully so, many colleges require at least a B in a course to waive the requirement because students who only manage a C or worse in the course, while taking twice or four times as long (because college courses are usually taught by semester or quarter), cannot be adequately prepared for upper level classes.
I would be very interested to see how the number of students achieving 4’s and 5’s at Nipmuc has changed over the past years (or even just 5’s). I would expect to see that this number has grown at a much smaller rate.
That is to say, the statistics given to us as proof that our AP program (and general quality of education in the district) is increasing are not sufficient evidence for the quality of colleges that many students and parents aspire to attend.
This brings me into the second question: “where are the admissions to Ivy League schools and the academic scholarships?” You are correct that Nipmuc students do fairly well for themselves in attaining admission/scholarships to good local schools that will prepare them adequately for a moderately successful adult life. I don’t think this is the point of the question from the Milford Daily.
Instead, I think we all have to take a step back and view this from a neutral perspective, without bias from our own personal experiences. Which schools are the ones who are, not only academically and professionally preparing students for the world after college, but are cultivating leaders in technology, finance, medicine, film/television, academia, and other broad fields of employment? Here are some of the schools that fit this description, although certainly not all of them: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Duke, Cornell, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, NYU, etc. These are the schools that people from our district are talking about when we say that Nipmuc students aren’t getting admitted to prestigious universities or aren’t receiving scholarships to prestigious universities.
Of course these universities are ridiculously difficult to gain admission to, even from top private and public high schools. At these top high schools, only the top 60th, or 80th, or 90th percentile of students are gaining admittance to these universities.
The problem is that Nipmuc is barely achieving admittance for our top 99th or even 100th percentile of students. Every year or two, a very gifted and hard-working student from Nipmuc is able to attend one of the universities, but for the most part, we often fail to get even a single student into these universities (without resorting to delayed or waitlisted admission). When you compare these statistics to towns around us with similar demographics, you see how low Nipmuc’s achievement level actually is. If you attend a Milford Chamber of Commerce honors dinner, you’ll see how students from BVT, Hopedale, Milford, Sutton, Douglas, etc. are getting into these top universities every year.
I think both of these questions posed in the Milford Daily article are, at the moment, open questions where only the upper-administration of the district can provide any information. Please feel free to discuss.
Bob, given your thoughtful answer, why would you want to tear down our school system any further? We’ve spent years trying to build it up. The information you give frightens me, but it motivates me even more to vote yes!
Debbie, I certainly do want to keep building up the school system. While I’m not an ardent supporter of the direction that the district is trying to go, I still believe that an increase in spending on marginally useful endeavors is better than not spending anything at all. In this case, I am a yes vote, but with the hope that we can better align the goals of the district with the goals of the students and parents.
Then we agree, Bob.
We have to do better.
I wish people could disconnect the tie between support of the override and support of the district and it’s desire to improve.
My wife and I are residents who just had our children return to the District after choicing out for four years to maintain the quality of children’s public education, specifically Spanish Immersion. This personal choice cost our communities money and also added additional personal costs to us that I am happy to not be paying or sending to another community. In evaluating our choice last year to return we took a very close look at the overall school opportunities and quality of curriculum and we’re happy to find the District was really focusing on programs like immersion, AP courses, STEM and the 1:1 Ipad initiative to make changes and improvements in the education of our children. These programs are the differentiators that are preparing our kids for a much different college education and job market than I faced just 20 years ago as an entry level engineer coming out of college. For these reasons I am supporting the Forward 15 initiative and the override.
AP scores while nice are in many ways overrated. While they claim “college level” and eliminate the need to retake the course at college, according to the “college board”, there are many colleges who don’t accept them, don’t grant waivers (or grant based on very high grade attainment) and in several instances very dependent on one’s major. As far as the claim of “college level”. The “course work” might be there but an AP course taught by a typical HS educator is far different than a Professonr. In some cases, some Educators might also teach at local community colleges and in those cases using College Level approaces at a HS level is not always a good thing. While it’s helpful, there is way too much hype on AP and that is coming from someone whose child was a AP Scholar w/Distinction who recently graduated with an Engling/Ed Minor and is now subbing..
Jenn, I am a degreed engineer from WPI. I have been working in highly technical fields for 13 years. I 100% agree that learning through technology is essential in this day and age. My educator wife has mentioned that she wouldn’t know what she would do without her SMARTboard. I do have a problem though with the district getting on the Apple bandwagon. There are more cost effective solutions that provide more value per dollar than iPads. Chromebooks for example are just as effective web browsers and are a quarter of the cost. With a Chromebook you can use an abundance of Google online office products, which may not be as power as MS products, but you can write a research paper/write literature/type notes easily. Much more bang for your buck at a quarter of the price, saving the district loads of money. Jumping on the Apple bandwagon smells of “keeping up with the Joneses” in my opinion.
what’s interesting is that at almost every university we visited that happened to mention being able to rent equipment 90% of the time it was an apple product the other 10% it was apple or something else.
There is a reason for that, and it’s not productivity. Apple provides incentives to schools to get them “hooked” early. I have personally watched iPads come into the board room, but be immediately replaced the second the more useful alternative was presented. It’s not that Apple products are completely useless. They do proliferate in the Industrial Design world and other “art” based disciplines like photogrpahy, marketing communications, etc. If you are looking at STEM based professions (or any non-art based profession really), you will be hard pressed to find a proliferation of Apple products.
If investing in the Apple infrastructure at your home or business is the choice you want to make when it’s your own money your spending, more power to you. Choice is what makes this country great. When your spending my tax dollars though, there are solutions which provide more value to a greater number of students at a MUCH lower cost. These important things to think about when you have a budget. If this is the thinking about technology, where else does this line of thinking proliferate when the district makes spending decisions?
Those of us with children younger than yours, like me, should learn from your experiences. Thanks for sharing.
Well said Jenn! Congrats to Lindsey on her accomplishments!
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