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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.
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 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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