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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.
The article is behind a paywall for me, but I can say that, in general, this is a difficult question. I taught high school for many years, and in my experience non-honors students learn less in homogeneous classrooms in which honors students have been taken out, in part because in such classrooms teachers are stretched thinner -- there are more students who need individual attention, for example, so each student who needs individual attention is going to get less. And, if the average non-honors student learns, say, 10 pct less each year, that is going to add up to a whole lot less learning over 12 years.
OTOH, honors-level students will learn less in heterogenous classes (i.e., in a school without honors classes) than in homogenous classes.
Hence, there is no "right" answer. There is a choice that has to be made about which group you want to prioritize. Note also that, if African-American students are overrepresented among non-honors students, then choosing to have honors classes de facto means that African American students will learn less than they otherwise would in a school without honors classes. That is true regardless of the cause of African American student's lower propensity to learn -- it is true if the cause is cultural, or genetic, or because of "systemic racism" or whatever.
So, if the district decides that is it more important to maximize outcomes for African American students (or for non-honors students), then it indeed makes sense to eliminate honors classes. If the district decides it is more important to maximize outcomes for high-skill students, then it does not make sense to eliminate honors classes. But, again, that is a genuine policy dilemma.
Removing honors classes and putting the smart kids in an easy class where they don't need the teacher is comparable to just sending them home and having smaller class sizes. If they're not learning anything from the teacher because they don't need the teacher's help, then why are they even in school? It's just a way of having 20 actively learning students in a class but pretending you have class sizes of 30. I can see the appeal from a certain perspective, this combines the steps of:
Have smaller class sizes, which increases learning and costs.
Stop teaching smart kids, which reduces the costs created by step 1.
Mask the whole process so it looks less obviously unjust than doing steps 1 and 2 in isolation.
But if you're actually paying attention, you realize that step 3 doesn't actually change how just it is, merely the surface appearance. I don't see the dilemma, this is a strictly worse policy than just letting smart kids test out of school so you don't have to spend money teaching them, and then having smaller class sizes for whoever's left. Which is itself a pretty dubious proposition, but still less dubious than wasting the smart kids' time.
Except that I did not say that. I said that some students need** individual attention**. Some students learn from the teacher -- eg, from lecture -- yet do not need individual attention in the classroom.
This "teacher == lecture" equivalence was fractured by the invention of video, and is being dismantled by software.
Frankly, even "comparable to just sending them home" was overstating the equivalence. Khan Academy lectures can be played back with adjustable speed, parts can be replayed if necessary, and although the interleaved quizzes aren't as good as individual attention they're way better than lecture alone. The only added value a teacher brings is discipline and individual attention.
What if we split the difference? You could sit the honors kids in the back classroom in front of self-paced software, where they'll need even less individual attention! That would thereby give teachers even more time to spend on the kids who need it more, meeting Rawlsian goals, and it would still be shortchanging the smarter kids of resources so you'd think it would even meet envious goals. You'd think the left would be happy. But, when at the end of a few years the bulk of the class are struggling slightly less with fractions and the smarter kids are solving quadratics, somehow I don't think that will be good enough. The "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents" crowd dropped the mask when they first proposed to take the quick-witted middle schoolers out of Algebra I rather than to put the slower ones in; at that point it became too clear that "reject" meant "combat", not "disbelieve".
Note that I said "eg, lecture" rather than "ie, lecture." Also, a lecture in a k-12 classroom is usually more of a q and a than a straight lecture. Not that some students can't learn from av ideo lecture -- some can ---but the set of "students who can learn from video lectures" is definitely not the same as the set of "students who do not need individual attention." A better alternative is to 1) introduce concept; 2) ask stronger students to think about extensions ofthe concept; while 3) teacher gives individual attention to weaker students to make sure they understand the basic concept.
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This is counter-acted by the fact that you provide everyone the same content. Typically, after a teacher explained something, some of the students understood it and some didn't. Now the teacher has to make a decision: continue with the lesson and lose the kids that didn't understand, or go over the same topic again (maybe in a different or more detailed way) and lose the kids that already got it and are now getting bored and not learning anything new.
The advantage of the video at least is that the experience can be tailored to the individual's needs. Students can pause, replay or skip over parts depending on how well they understood the material. And it's not necessarily repeating content verbatim: interactive courses can include optional exercises, in-depth explanations, etc. similar to what a teacher might provide.
The fundamental limitation of group-based teaching is that it goes only at a single speed, so at best it's optimized for the average student, and doesn't cater to either the under- or over-performing student. In practice, it's optimized for the below-average student, because if kids are failing classes that's considered bad (“no child left behind”) but if smart students aren't learning as much as they could have, nobody gives a crap.
Is this something that LLMs could help with? You could get one to rephrase the same definition over and over again, with more and more examples and it wouldn't get irritated. Neural networks can reportedly already analyze which students are disengaged by reading their faces, so a robot-TA that pops up and tirelessly tries to help the student with their problem would be the next logical step.
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The parents would lose "free" daycare and the schools would lose the per-student payments from the government if they took that approach though.
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It’s probably more important in the modern world to push up your top students. World is getting more scalable. And a countries tech development depends far more on the top. For civil society matters some to have a well educated populace that understands what’s going on.
But there’s another solution since you say lower performers need more individual attention. You could probably teach the AP at scale like intro college courses. And shift to smaller classes on the lower performers. The only issue is a lot of teachers don’t like teaching lower performing and like to have a student who they feel will go somewhere.
You could also cut teaching pay and boost number of teachers in some of the blue areas doing this. Chicagos around 100k a year for a teacher. If you pay Florida wages you could shrink class sizes.
I actually don’t think the AP would scale well at all. Think about how many people fail out of college because they don’t go to lectures or keep up with assignments. Then take away their financial skin in the game, deduct a couple years of life experience such as intro jobs, and force them to stay on “campus” all day. It’d be a bloodbath.
The staffing issue isn’t great either. I’ve never met a professor who’d rather teach freshman lectures than more selective classes. Is that because of the interest of the subject, or because monologuing to 200 people is boring and/or stressful? Either way, there’d be less desire to maximize AP class sizes.
High school also precludes the usual university staffing solution of underpaid TAs. Schedule flexibility is much lower, and there’s no carrot of scholarships or research spots. Without TAs, good luck grading the assignments of giant lecture sections.
In my opinion, one of the more valuable skills from AP is an asking-questions kind of relationship with the teacher. That’s the kind of thing which gets people going to office hours or research assistants in college. Large lectures are a hard limit to that given a high-school schedule.
Most of these problems are much, much worse if you’re simultaneously slashing wages. The market price for a teacher in Chicago accounts for cost of living, Union efforts, enjoyability of the job and the leisure time…force that to match Florida, and you’ll find people would rather be in Florida.
Cost of living isn’t much higher in Chicago/Illinois. And Florida has better academic performance when adjusting for race. It’s mostly just unions.
I’m seeing Chicago as slightly cheaper than Miami, but more expensive than all the other listed Florida cities, which are more comparable to Houston or Richmond.
But my point stands. You are paying teachers to live in Illinois rather than somewhere with a comparable cost but no snow, better beaches, and different politics. I’m sure we can model some of the difference as due to unions, and some fraction of that as self-perpetuating overhead rather than an actual service that people would pay for. How much? I think if you cut wages to Florida levels, the marginal teach would feel much better about moving to Florida. Or Albequerque, or anywhere with similar pay.
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I think most teachers would be happy teaching lower performers in a setting in which they can do so successfully (ie, in a setting in which students show actual progress). And of course in high schools, a teacher could have some classes with higher performers and some with lower performers.
Yes, there is definitely a tradeoff between salary and class sizes. Of course, there is also the problem that lower ciass sizes = more teachers = need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find all those extra teachers. OTOH, there are plenty of teachers who are not effective in large non-honors classes but who would be effective in smaller classes (eg: a teacher who is not great at classroom management). Again, it is a complex problem.
Even that has tradeoffs -- larger classes = more time grading homework (a big deal for any class which requires writing: 100 essays at 15 min per essay = 25 hours of grading), so teachers of larger classes might end up assigning less demanding work.
It is really a more complex problem than is normally assumed.
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Nonsense. Of course there is a right answer, which is to not do these things. It's not like this is the first time it's ever been tried. Schemes like this have been tried over and over and over for 50 years or more. It always results in ruin and devastation for the school system. Even the stated goal of "Well, kids that need more individual attention learn more when you have classes of smart kids that need less individual attention because there is more individual attention freed up for them" fails to materialize. Because these policies are rarely pursued in isolation. And "equity first" batch of policies, in addition to scrapping achievement, usually also scraps discipline. If parents of achieving kids were frustrated that their kids no longer had access to higher maths or proper AP classes, they become terrified at how increasingly violent the schools become. Seemingly just daycares for felons in training.
Sure, not all the parents will pull their kids out. But I can promise you families that care about their kids will stop moving there. Then things really start going south as the tax base for schools begins to decrease. Now you have schools full of dumb, violent, out of control kids, and no money to deal with the problem.
On a side note, needs individual attention is the best euphemism for fetal alcohol syndrome I've ever heard. I look back on my public school days, with a mix of well off suburbs and trailer parks funneling into the same school district, and the need to keep those groups separate was paramount. Woe betide you if you were a kid who wanted to learn, and were stuck in a class with even 2 or 3 kids who would spring from their desk every 3 minutes and begin smacking people or singing loudly and off key or jumping on their desk. You could go an entire year and not learn one single thing over the teacher's ineffectual shouting. Getting away from them was the singular reason I worked hard in school. Because otherwise I could give a shit about memorizing dates in history, or doing sentence diagrams until my hands cramped.
At least back then, everybody was white, so nobody cared.
You are not really addressing my argument, as is evidenced by this:
Leaving aside that that is absolutely wrong -- you have clearly never taught high school economics -- if a school indeed has students with fetal alcohol syndrome, it has to figure out how to serve their needs, and how to balance serving their needs with serving the needs of other students, because there are always tradeoffs. As I said, it really doesn't matter what the cause of low ability is.
I did address you argument in literally the entire rest of my post. But you do you.
Let me tell you how this went in a rather high profile case near me. A kid with obvious special needs was constantly violent. Problem was, the parents refused to agree to any program the school suggested. They insisted he stay in regular class. It got so bad, the school told the parents they needed to accompany the child in school 100% of the time. I'm under the impression the school did not actually have the authority to request this, and the parents didn't bother.
Anyways, eventually this 6 year old kid gets ahold of his mother's gun and shoots his teacher. After the school was warned 4 times that day that people had seen the kid with the gun, the kid had said he'd shoot his teacher, etc. The administrators just wanted to wait it out and hope nothing happened. Their hands were practically tied because of policies getting rid of the "school to prison pipeline".
That is the terminal destination of these policies.
Is this actually true? What specific policies were there stopping them? What policies preventing them notifying Children's Protective Services? or the police? Is this a policy issue or an issue where people didn't believe a six year old would have a gun and threaten someone with it (for example) or laziness or complacency? and therefore didn't follow the policies they should have? The indication seems to have been that by policy they should have notified the police when they received the tip rather than simply just searching the kids backpack and then dropping the matter.
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For anyone interested, @WhiningCoil is presumably referring to the shooting of Abby Zwerner in Virginia.
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No, you actually didn't. You addressed a different issue. You did not address at all the argument that there are tradeoffs between what is best for high skills students and what is best for low skills students.
Again, what does that have to do with the issue? Leaving aside that 6-yr-olds shooting teachers is not exactly a central example of the issue, the fact that this particular school made the wrong decision in this particular case does not mean that the tradeoffs that I identified do not exist.
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