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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.
No need to apologize, appreciate the criticism.
Not trying to troll, just looking to flesh out my own knowledge. Seems reasonable to expect more effort out of top-level posts, but what does that look like?
A timebox for research beforehand (you must spend 10 min researching and 10 min writing about the topic before posting)?
What are the characteristics of a good top-level post? Do you have some examples of your favorite top-level posts?
What is DSL?
DSL = Data Secrets Lox, another discussion forum in the same cultural sphere.
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