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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.
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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