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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.
If there's an inequality, and you want equality, you can solve it by several ways. The hardest one is to lift everyone to the top - this was the official goal of communism, but by now we can be pretty sure it's not achievable. The easiest one is to bring everybody to the bottom - this is what implementing communism usually leads to (though in reality even at the bottom there's inequality - you could have slightly less moldy bread than your neighbor). You can just stop measuring and declare it to be heretical. The wokes now are trying to implement the combined 2+3 strategy - brining people as much as possible to the bottom, and declaring merit tests racist.
Early AI koan:
Unfortunately, is is much harder to enlighten people that imagine if they rebuild something with their biases instead of somebody else's, they'd get an unbiased result.
Right, I am imagining that rather than having an explicit inequality (honors classes vs non-honors classes) you end up with a gray area where some teachers are better than others and then skillful/determined parents are the only ones that can get their kids in the right classes.
Love the koan, thanks for the thoughts.
The effect of it would be that parents with a lot of resources and good ability to hustle would get their kids into good schools to good teachers, using various proxy methods (paying for more expensive house, driving the kid longer, hiring tutors, using private schools) while parents of a bright kid that have little resources would have no options, since there's no formal "honors" framework they could lean on for support. Which is diametrically opposite to the stated goal of the "equality" system. But that's how it usually works.
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