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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.
This is meta, but I wonder if our prohibition on "low-effort" top level posts has had a negative side effect. It seems that, more and more, it is low information or low conscientiousness users who post at the top level. Other users recognize that the standards for a top level post are supposed to be high, and don't want to spend an hour writing up something nice, doing research, etc... There are things I've considered posting which would serve as a jumping off point for discussion. I haven't posted them because I didn't have the time to write a long, researched, personal take.
@prof_xi_o I apologize since you asked us to be nice, but in my opinion, this is not a high quality top level post. What's more, since you haven't engaged with the responses, you pattern match to me a personal who is not sincere in actually "learning more" but just trying to troll. I hope this isn't the case.
I'm continually surprised by the people who are willing to write novels in response to this type of top-level content. I think we can do much better. Perhaps the rules for top-level posts can be loosened so that a good faith user can submit a top-level comment without needing to spend a large amount of time doing so. DSL seems to have a much broader number of topics to discuss. This site is much better designed so it would be nice to have similar discussions here.
I miss the pinned 'low effort thread' mod comments that we had on reddit for a while, it was a good way to collect current happenings and smaller topics that don't necessarily need a 5 paragraph write up.
I was hoping that the culture war roundup would be that place (where current happenings get a little bit more wiggle room), but based on the feedback I’m getting it sounds like the community expects more effort out of top-level posts.
If you have any specific suggestions or some top-level posts you really like I’d love to hear/see them
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