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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.
I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee
The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.
On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.
On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.
It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.
Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.
Curious to know more.
Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.
Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.
Method is theory, theory is method. If you try to raise the one without the other it will slack and bring the other with it. Tying them together prevents the existence of any avenue for criticism.
I would say it's different from similar practices in Malaysia/Nigeria or wherever solely because it's America, and thus the top; everything under the principal is hidden in its shadow and not taken publicly to be the exemplal intention of that process. Like in law, the appearance of the thing is usually taken from how it appears at its highest strata, even when the actual events underlying the appearance differ drastically across the spectrum.
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