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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.
Whether we judge something as "effective" requires establishing a goal or ideal state to measure against. If the entire goal is to remove racial disparity in honors classes, then this will work. By all means throw out the baby and keep the bathwater. The actual effects of these actions are: parents that can afford it remove their kids from the district and send them to private school or move the entire family to a new district. These kids were always going to be fine. The poorer kids, and especially the (inequitable) number of racial minorities who did manage to get into these programs are back with the dumb and disruptive kids, the opportunity to imagine a better like, or at least a life around a smarter class of people, is likely gone for these kids forever. In short this program provided better outcomes for some, but not enough, of members of the desired groups, so now it helps none of them at all. To be fair to the kids.
I’m inclined to agree, but do you also agree that having a different racial makeup of these honors classes relative to baseline is a problem? If so, how do other ideologies (non-woke) solve it in a productive way?
Yes, it also occurred to me that motivated/resourced parents will get their kids in with better teachers at the same school (even though they are all non-honors now).
Why is this a problem? Is the disparate makeup of the school basketball team a problem? Have we measured the representation of people with attached earlobes? Are stupid people adequately represented in honors classes? “Stupid” seems like a much more salient category than race if we are seeking diversity of thought, perspective or life experience.
Even if it is a problem, is it a higher concern than the quality of the honors classes? Perhaps increasing equity cannot be done without degrading class quality to near non-honors levels, is that worth it?
It's a problem if there is a causal link to historical events in the United States, right (redlining, slavery, Jim Crow, etc)?
I think that a stupid person could be successful in an honors class, they would just need to put in more work relative to their genius classmates. The honors class might even be better for it, as the stupid person might have different perspectives on the literature during discussions (in an honors English class, for example). I could see a stupid person in a math class being disruptive though, depending on what we mean by stupid.
What is the optimal distribution of stupidity amongst students for learning rate in a school classroom (this is a flippant question, it just occurred to me and sounded funny)? Is the intelligence distribution of a class the most important factor for learning rate? Or is it things like class size, teacher goodness, school funding, and student social support? Maybe we should filter out kids with poor resourcing so that the well-resourced kids can learn faster?
edit: comma
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