Plainview Ave
Raleigh, NC 27604

Conn practices tracking at a very young age, putting kids with higher tests scores (who are predominantly upper class and white) in more challenging classes, which reinforces racial and class inequality. It's a common yet extremely disturbing practice, and it needs to stop.

I don't really get the complaints about AIG at this school. Both my kids are dual-identified and had positive experiences at Ligon overall (some teacher turnover-- endemic in a state that pays teachers so poorly, not just a Ligon problem). If your child excels in math, they will be in a high-level math class appropriate to their skill. Call it AIG or call it "math 3"-- it's the same thing; smart kids who are at the same aptitude. Both of my kids were in cohorts of AIG students in their other core classes even if not all kids were technically AIG. Kids are identified AIG in third grade (with a lot of Wake parents getting their kids privately tested to push them into the program). Creating exclusive classes that leave out other high-performing kids based on someone's skill at test taking as an eight year old flies in the face of equity and does a disservice to all kids. These exclusive programs created a school within a school at Ligon for years; I'm glad they've changed their model. Ligon also has truly amazing and well-resourced arts programs. If your child is at all interested in music, art, theater, or dance the programs are excellent.

Perhaps the instruction will improve in my child's senior year, but, thus far, the science instruction has been poor. My child's chemistry teacher, perhaps the one referenced in another review, states that the classroom is "flipped," which actually means that the students are instructed watching assigned videos at home. Supposedly, this is supposed to free the student for higher-level learning in school. What actually happens is that the students discuss problems in groups where, as beginning chemistry students, it is the blind leading the blind. My child has come home with completely incorrect answers because the majority of the group got the same (incorrect) answer, and the students had no other way of determining if the answer was correct. Utilizing AI as a "tutor" is tacitly encouraged in Chemistry, and the one teacher-generated quiz that has been given was obviously AI generated. (This has absolutely NOT been true for the humanities and social sciences teachers, so far.) Furthermore, the student is never allowed to bring the graded test or quiz home on the pretext that the tests will be kept, fraternity-style, for students next year to cheat. Besides the jaw-dropping fact that apparently the science teachers are incapable of coming up with more than on test's worth of questions on their own, this gives lie to the idea that students can actually improve their work. The student literally has no idea what they got wrong on a quiz or test, so they can't improve for next time. Unless your student is already several grades ahead in the sciences, I wouldn't recommend sending them to Enloe for core science classes, based on our experience. I am not sure if I regret sending my child to Enloe because many aspects of Enloe are very good or superior to other public or private schools. The science instruction, so far, is very, very bad.