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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32787 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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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.

It is important to note that the honors classes did not have a "clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline." First, there was no suggestion of any "bias," there was only the observed result that the racial makeup of students in the honors classes did not match the racial makeup of the general student body. That "bias" was the first (and only) reason the school considered is a failure. Second, the disparity was laughably small. The school is 15% black and the honors class was 14% black. That's a rounding error.

There's a quote from one of the teachers saying that she looked at the class photograph and wondered where all the black kids were. That's the level of logic on which this school is operating.

Here's the quote from the article, it seems like you're misrepresenting it (or being flippant, maybe I am misunderstanding?):

Culver City English teachers presented data at a board meeting last year showing Latino students made up 13% of those in 12th-grade Advanced Placement English, compared with 37% of the student body. Asian students were 34% of the advanced class, compared with 10% of students. Black students represented 14% of AP English, versus 15% of the student body.

If you're quibbling with the word choice of "bias" that's fine, what I meant to say was:

There was a clear disparity in the racial makeup of honors classes relative to baseline (student body) (according to the article)

Oh, hell. I can’t help but wonder if statistics was taught there.

I think it's more of a question of whether or not statistics was learned there rather than whether or not it was taught there. I'm reminded of the saying that you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

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