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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.
We have to distinguish between positive-sum and zero-sum activities. If I'm hiring someone for the first kind of job, e.g. a contractor to build my house, then it's in my interest to do so meritocratically and without political favoritism, because I actually care about the result i.e. the house getting built. And by extension, if I delegate to you the task of finding me a contractor, but you recommend your cousin's firm as a personal favor to him, then I have a right to take issue with that because you (my agent) did not act according to the interest of me (the principal). The same is true if I'm a taxpayer and you're a government bureaucrat in charge of hiring a contractor to fix up the roads in my city, etc.
On the other hand, for the second kind of job (e.g. politicians, pundits, public intellectuals), there is no question of "merit" because the whole point of the job is to take stuff from one group and give it to another. The sole qualification for the job is "are you on my side or not". I may equally object to so-called "meritocracy" in this case, because it's a betrayal of the social contract by which I can focus my efforts on positive-sum value creation on the understanding that my interests will still be represented in the zero-sum arena. Without this understanding, we're left with a stagnant, materially impoverished society like the classic third-world oil dictatorship.
Where do honors classes fit into this dichotomy? It's hard to say, which is why this is such a difficult issue. Students taking honors classes may be doing so with the goal of going into a career of value-creation or a career of value-reallocation, or (more likely) they haven't even decided yet. Furthermore, there is an almost inevitable tendency (which classically-liberal society tries to stamp out, but lately without much success) for people to parlay status and wealth gained through the value-creation track into influence on value-reallocation. When society's direction is being shaped by a handful of tech billionaires, people may rightly see STEM education as a zero-sum game, even though it isn't inherently.
Obvious troll solution: keep the honors and AP classes, but remove the bonus grade point. That eliminates the incentives to take those classes to get a better position on the value-reallocation ladder while still leaving the classes available for the 4 students who want to take them to learn better.
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