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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.
Diana Moon Glampers is, inarguably, 'super effective'! Does the International Math Olympiad's disproportionate asianness (and lack of blacks) indicate 'bias', and should that be retired until equity is ensured? But eh, we've been over this a ton. And it reads like bait, where is HIynka?
Anyway, why think / post so much about "whatever the media wrote about yesterday"? Is (recent headline #5) really that relevant to the real problem of 'educating / teaching your kid'? How much value does "Honors Compare And Contrast The Use Of Vocabulary In Chaucer And Shakespeare" really provide over the standard course? Both are inferior to "reading whatever you feel like on wikipedia", tbh. If you, or your 16yo kid, want to be a great writer, should you fight to preserve Honors English, or ... (for you or the kid) have a blog, debate topics you care about on the internet?. Even if those alternatives seem 'meh', the political simulacra wastes away whatever scraps remain of your will to actually cause better writing - so instead of reading Old Books with your kid, you end up fighting for (R) control of your school board while your kid writes furry fanfics.
Love the short story (hadn't read that one), but it seems like the most relevant criticism it presents would be that this policy change (no honors classes) limits competition. I'm wondering if the opposite is true (this policy change increases opportunities for competition).
If you agree that social/cultural factors end up filtering (in part) who takes honors classes, wouldn't removing that filter allow for more "honest" competition within the regular classes?
Is there also, like, an anarcho-capitalist (or maybe just capitalist?) argument for this kind of policy? Where each teacher gets to make their class as awesome or distinct as possible and then market-like forces dictate which classes kids take and which teachers/classes parents hold in high regard?
Yes, it indicates bias (could argue about whether it's bad or not). No, because there's no "regular" Olympiad to integrate with.
So, this is a reasonable question to ask, but this is the culture war roundup, and this is clearly a culture-war issue, right? I certainly found it to be a thought-provoking idea (maybe it's not). I was (and still am) excited about all of the responses I've gotten thus far. Maybe what you're alluding to is that the culture war doesn't matter and that we should phase out the roundup? It doesn't seem futile to argue about the right way to educate kids, although maybe what you are expressing is fatigue at rehashing this topic (I get the sense it may have been discussed before). I'll admit that maybe too many resources (time/money) are spent on political endeavors rather than "real" endeavors. One thing that honors classes can give (that can't be provided by you or I reading with our kids) would be opportunities to critique literary works amongst peers (or the filtered "smart kids" in honors classes).
Should we only post about what our favorite blogger wrote about yesterday?
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