Dillard President wants to end tops for a lot of Louisiana students......

Too. Much. Stupid.

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lower the ACT score

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Given the low standards, should anyone who does not qualify for TOPS be in college to begin with?

I posted this link on my FB page this morning and this is what I wrote along with it:

So you actually have a college president actively calling for LESS students to get financial aid. Bizarro world!!

Look, it's obvious there is a link between income levels and student performance. But this doesn't fix the problem. TOPS isn't that hard to get. Putting an income max on the scholarship will simply result in smarter students getting scholarships to attend school out of state (because our in-state schools are poorly funded and probably can't take on the additional scholarship burden). Lowering the standards to get TOPS may result in more poor students getting to go to college, but will they actually be able to be successful? Again, the current standards for TOPS isn't that hard.

Maybe this president instead needs to focus on the issue with poor students and performance at the elementary and HS school level, and try to figure out how to fix that problem. That will be how he can best help poor students. If we can get poor students to perform better in K-12 education, TOPS will be there for them.

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Scumbag wants more money to pump into his failing, bottom-tier school.

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It's a private school, just tuition for a semester is $7,519.

Admission standards for Dillard: 2.5 GPA, 18 ACT

So if he can get the ACT score for TOPS down to an 18, he can get the state to pay for part of the tuition for his minimum students.

Taking public money and using it for private education... hmmm... I wonder what this guy's stance is on K-12 vouchers.

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Cap the income level of families that are eligible for TOPS ($60,000), lower the ACT score and raise the grade-point average

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To do this would completely undermine the reason why ACT score is important to begin with......you have dummies in some of these ridiculously bad schools getting high GPA's...due to less rigorous academic standards. The ACT score is a large component of keeping everyone on a level playing field.

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low-income students, defined by ACT as those from families earning less than $36,000 a year, scored 17 to 20 points below the all-student average in each area.

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State- Louisiana
Average Composite Score 20.3
Average English Score 20.4
Average Math Score 19.9
Average Reading Score 20.4

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so they score between a 0-3 on the ACT?

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you have dummies in some of these ridiculously bad schools getting high GPA's...due to less rigorous academic standards. The ACT score is a large component of keeping everyone on a level playing field.

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Remember how we got high stakes testing and all the school accountability stuff? During the Foster administration, there were a bunch of stories in the Times-Picayune (back when it was actually a decent newspaper) regarding NOLA public school valedictorians who had like 3.9 GPAs, and were getting scores on the ACT in the 12-13 range, and needed remedial classes in college and eventually flunked out. It was obvious that the grades being handed out, and diplomas being handed out, were an absolute joke.

There was a ton of public pressure and the Legislature and Foster and BESE created the accountability program, re-did the LEAP and GEE tests (the GEE especially was insanely easy and you only needed a 50 percent score to pass) and tied the test results to promotion.

And ever since then, certain people in certain communities have been trying to roll back those standards, under the guise of "it's not fair to poor people."

This is just the latest example.

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low-income students, defined by ACT as those from families earning less than $36,000 a year, scored 17 to 20 points below the all-student average in each area.

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Is he talking about ACT scores? If so wouldn't that mean that those people are averaging a score of below 10 on the ACT? Does he really think those are the people who need to be going to college?

The school is not a failure. Tells me a lot about what you know.