To Increase Equity, School Districts Eliminate Honors Classes

[desjardins]

Just another advantage for the talented children of people who can afford private school.
Kids don’t perform the same for a multitude of reasons but I know so many black inner city kids who benefited from being fast tracked while young. Sucks that some of them will have their potential impacted by this.

I was just watching Abbott elementary and telling someone how there was like 3-4 different reading levels per grade in my elementary school. Each group had their own textbooks and all. Don’t think a school could ever get away with doing that now.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

You're right. It has nothing to do with race. It's culture.



African kids go to these same shythole schools and do well there.

Modern Black American culture does not value education and you know it in your heart of hearts. It's a fatal flaw of our culture. I used to be in denial about it too, since it hurt my feelings. But we all have to come to terms with the truth one day.

You're just repeating the model minority myth.

If "African culture" were the solution, then wouldn't "African education" and "African nations" be thriving? Or are you going to pretend that context matters for that case, but then just completely ignore context in the other case?

African students in general do not thrive. A certain subset of African immigrants, who overwhelmingly come from families who already have educational or financial resources, do do well. And the vast majority of them don't go to the shyttiest urban schools. That's the classic cherry-picking fallacy - if you select for a few kids who have the background and resources to succeed regardless of environment and then pretend that's the norm, you can claim anything. But the 95% of kids from the exact same culture who wouldn't be able to succeed in that situation are still back at home, still failing educationally, and you ignore them. Nearly 70% of Nigerian immigrants have a college education while only 8% of Nigerians in general are college educated. If culture was the answer, then why are 90+% of their countrymates failing to get an education? They've had decades for "culture" to transform their society, so what's the problem? Same thing can be said for India, Pakistan, Thailand, Philippines, etc.

If "African culture" were the answer, then why is it that college-educated or financially prepared African immigrants do well here, but most Africans who come from refugee situations (and thus are less cherry-picked for success) don't show the same?


And you still haven't proposed a single solution. "Do better Black people!" is not a blueprint for social transformation. You can't point to a single city where that has worked.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

What resources? At least at my high school, the only difference between AP and non-AP classes was the curriculum, the textbooks and different teachers for some.

AP courses almost always have lower class sizes, which means that extra kids have to be stuffed in the other classes. If you naturally would have 25 students per class, but the AP class only has 15 students in it, then you have to make the other classes 28-30 to compensate. Now the AP students get twice the individual attention from teachers that the other students are getting.

In addition, AP classes almost always have the best teachers, so other kids get the less qualified teachers. Either the kids are forced to pay the test fees for the AP tests themselves, or the school pays those fees too. And many schools give their AP course offerings greater access to supplemental resources than their regular course offerings get.

AP Classes Are a Scam

The College Board earns over half of all its revenues from the courses—and, in an uncertain environment, students keep being suckered.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[FluffyEyes]

I don't think enough black people understand how offensive it is when they do shyt like this or purposely lower test scores or say shyt like "black kids learn differently"

Embarrassing honestly.

Exactly.

 

[Secure Da Bag]

The United States is not Finland.

At least in NYC, charter schools have reduced the so-called educational racial achievement gap. Schools that are 100% black and Latino, most under the poverty line, and often housed in the very same buildings as several public schools have a much larger amount of children scoring 3's and 4's rather than 1's and 2's on the standardized tests. In one year 5th graders, Success kids from Harlem, scored higher as a whole than 5th graders in all of New York state on the Math test, even higher than those in affluent nearby Westchester suburbs like Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor.

link?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

This, I remember in 7th grade we had the option of taking pre algebra or algebra when enrolling in my middle school, my mom told me to enroll in algebra, that tracked me ahead in math, nothing about that was “unfair”, I just literally had a mom who knew I was smart enough to jump right into HS level math.

You're explicitly pointing out that having parents who know how to work the system gives you advantages in the system.

Now think for 5 minutes about the fact that due to historic lack of access to education and educational systems, white parents are far more likely to know how to work the system than Black parents are.

So you're co-signing a system that ensures historic inequality will remain, rather than do anything to change it.

The idea that getting rid of honors classes is somehow gonna make C students more comfortable enrolling in APs because they don’t feel “separated” from honors kids is bullshyt.

You're supposedly well-educated, and you take pride in that. Stop speaking ignorantly and apply your educational knowledge to this issue.

I already shared the research background with you, and you're ignoring it while giving zero research of your own. That's what uneducated people do. It's not merely "feeling" separated, if you ghettoize the less-resourced kids off into their own low-performing classes then now they have a hundred reasons not to succeed. First off, they don't have access to high-performing kids and thus don't learn the strategies for success that the high-performing kids are practicing. Second, they don't get to work together with those kids and learn from their content knowledge or the way they solve problems. Third, they are often forced into higher class sizes, fewer resources, and less-qualified teachers so that the honors classes can maintain smaller class sizes with the best teachers and get better resources. On top of that, their situation is usually ignored by school counselors and other resource personnel, who focus their college-prep energy on the honors kids and the failing kids, and basically ignore the kids in the middle.



Every time we've discussed this issue, you've completely ignored the research, admitted you haven't done any study into the subject matter, and instead just repeated your personal anecdote and "feelings" about the issue. You wouldn't buy that sort of crap if we were talking about Covid or history or economics. So why do you think it should apply to educational research?

http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/boaler_de-tracking.pdf

Should Gifted Students Be In Separate Classrooms?

Earlier this year, the New York City School Diversity Advisory Group, a group of leaders, researchers, educators, and community members, convened by mayor

tcf.org

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Again how did the 5th graders of Harlem's Success Academy manage to outscore all public school 5th graders in New York state in 2013 even those who lived in places like Bronxville and Scarsdale, white and affluent suburban areas? It's the public school bureaucracy, teacher's unions, and declining standards and expectations and coddling why shyt is so fukked up.

Success Academy starts out with a self-selected population of students whose parents are already set up to be more successful, then works to weed out kids who are going to underperform before the mandated testing starts. In addition, when a school has a disproportionate # of students who are ready to do better, of course the other students are also going to perform well in response. That's the exact point we're making! High-performing students would be high-performing students anywhere, but low-performing students do much better when they get the opportunity to be around the high performers.



If Success Academy really believes in their educational model so much, then why are they still operating off a lottery system and continuing to work with only tiny subsets of the actual student body of any region?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Your proposal gives no reward for doing better. That is not how the world functions.

What kind of fake meritocracy nonsense is this?

In a well-functioning classroom there are a million intrinsic rewards for doing better, from the endorphin boost you get when you know the answer to a question to the increasing mental engagement of participating in a subject you understand and enjoy to actually being prepared for a future career that you have an interest in.

Needing to introduce artificial rewards for excellence actually depress subject matter comprehension and long-term achievement. There's a huge body of research on this.

Punished by Rewards? A Conversation with Alfie Kohn

In classrooms where students can make choices about learning and have tasks of worth to explore, the need for punishments or rewards declines sharply.

www.ascd.org

If someone’s mentality is, “I’m not good enough. I guess I’ll stay at the bottom,” they aren’t going to make it.

But you're literally arguing for systems that cement kids at the bottom and give almost no chance to improve. In tracked schools, it's horrendously difficult for students in the lower tracks to ever advance to the higher tracks - the vast majority of kids remain stuck wherever they're placed in elementary school.

The crazy thing is that even if your own philosophy was correct, your solution doesn't work. You're claiming that kids need to see the chance to advance and actual rewards for success, yet you want to entrench 90% of students into a lower-rung system where it's almost impossible to be at the top anymore.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

For all those people who are saying "It's culture! It's culture!"

Why are you advocating for a system that pulls the students with the "right culture" out of the student population and into their own separate classes, and therefore pretty much eliminates the chance for the majority of other Black kids to pick up the "right culture" themselves?

Your solution doesn't work even by your own assumptions. If you really thought culture was the issue, you'd want those kids mixing so that the lower-achieving students had a chance to pick up the right culture. Instead you're arguing for a system that not only fails to address the current inequalities, but would completely cement the "bad culture" and existing inequality by keeping all the kids who are dealt a bad hand from having the slightest chance to be exposed to a better way.

 

[ISO]

When Finland started this program, the vast majority of kids were in generational poverty. Finland was a lower-income country coming out of World War II and was not economically or educationally advanced in any sense. Also, Finland does have a significant number of people who speak Swedish as a first language, and in recent years has had high immigrant influx as well. They work extremely hard to ensure that immigrants get the same quality education as everyone else.

Source: I've attended educational conferences with multiple Finnish speakers. These include one of the higher-up people in their Department of Education, who told us she literally grew up without indoor plumbing in the 1970s and shat in an outhouse instead. They also included a Finnish teacher whose classes were something like 60% non-Finns, mostly from the Middle East and Africa.






Success Academy starts out with a self-selected population of students whose parents are already set up to be more successful, then works to weed out kids who are going to underperform before the mandated testing starts. In addition, when a school has a disproportionate # of students who are ready to do better, of course the other students are also going to perform well in response. That's the exact point we're making! High-performing students would be high-performing students anywhere, but low-performing students do much better when they get the opportunity to be around the high performers.



If Success Academy really believes in their educational model so much, then why are they still operating off a lottery system and continuing to work with only tiny subsets of the actual student body of any region? Why not operate like Green Dot charters in Los Angeles, and actually serve the entire student population of an area instead of just focusing on the ones you know have the best chance to score high on the tests?

Finland is not comparable to America. The ethnic minority groups found in urban inner city schools are historically oppressed people many living in generational poverty and in contrast to a dominant white society. The dynamic is entirely different than a mostly homogenous low income country developing post-war into a high income country. Finland has some immigration but nothing significant especially in comparison to a country like America. I'm not against learning things from Finland, I just wonder if it would work.

Success Academy takes the same kids from the community. It is not self-selected, the schools are in neighborhoods like Harlem, Bed-Stuy, Morrisania, its student population is 100% Black and Hispanic, the parents are living under the poverty line or working class. The whole neighborhood applies for this shyt. They select their students through a lottery admission process at complete random. They don't know how these students will perform and some come from public schools. The Harlem branch I mentioned runs K-12, 82% economically disenfranchised. Statistically, these kids have no business outscoring children from white affluent areas. The teacher unions and bureaucrats worst nightmare is these charter schools expanding and they got the politicians in their pocket to stop the expansion of the schools by preventing them from leasing spaces or constructing. You honestly think those who run these charter school networks wouldn't like to take every child, take over this whole shyt? Most of these charter schools are operating in the same building as public schools some on the same floor with much different outcomes. It kills a lot of narratives.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Finland is not comparable to America. The ethnic minority groups found in urban inner city schools are historically oppressed people many living in generational poverty and in contrast to a dominant white society. The dynamic is entirely different than a mostly homogenous low income country developing post-war into a high income country. Finland has some immigration but nothing significant especially in comparison to a country like America. I'm not against learning things from Finland, I just wonder if it would work.

You aren't explaining why any of this would keep their proven systems from working.

Why use these random excuses as reasons not to try the shyt that works, and instead advocate continuing with the status quo which clearly doesn't work?

Success Academy takes the same kids from the community. It is not self-selected

It is 100% self-selected. Students only get into the school if they apply via lottery, and only something like 20% of the students in the lottery get in. Thus the only students who get in are those who have parents who know about the system and understand the processes to work it to get their kids in. That's what "self-selected" means. So before you even start, you are ensuring that the kids in the school are only a subset of the community most likely to succeed.

On top of that, many Success Academy parents have said that Success Academy pressures lower-performing and learning disabled students to transfer out before state testing starts, so they don't bring down the averages.

The teacher unions and bureaucrats worst nightmare is these charter schools expanding and they got the politicians in their pocket to stop the expansion of the schools by preventing them from leasing spaces or constructing. You honestly think those who run these charter school networks wouldn't like to take every child, take over this whole shyt?

I'm not against charter schools. I think a solid charter school can do a great job. But they should teach the entire student body of a community, not run a lotto system which only selects a small subset they know will succeed and thus makes the remainder of kids even worse off. If you are subdividing the population between the haves and the have-nots, even the haves and have-nots within the poor, you're still setting up the majority of kids for failure.

 

[Matriarchy Refugee]

For all those people who are saying "It's culture! It's culture!"

Why are you advocating for a system that pulls the students with the "right culture" out of the student population and into their own separate classes, and therefore pretty much eliminates the chance for the majority of other Black kids to pick up the "right culture" themselves?

Your solution doesn't work even by your own assumptions. If you really thought culture was the issue, you'd want those kids mixing so that the lower-achieving students had a chance to pick up the right culture. Instead you're arguing for a system that not only fails to address the current inequalities, but would completely cement the "bad culture" and existing inequality by keeping all the kids who are dealt a bad hand from having the slightest chance to be exposed to a better way.

The problem is the culture of the parents. A child hanging out with a smart kid is not going to make their parents better at parenting. Not to mention it's way more likely that the smart kids will take after the dumb ones in order to fit in than the opposite. People are way more likely to dumb it down than smarten up.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The problem is the culture of the parents. A child hanging out with a smart kid is not going to make their parents better at parenting. Not to mention it's way more likely that the smart kids will take after the dumb ones in order to fit in than the opposite. People are way more likely to dumb it down than smarten up.

I've already given you cited research showing that de-tracking schools improves the performance of low-and-medium performing kids while not reducing the performance of high-performing kids at all. So why do you insist on claiming the opposite? You haven't offered the slightest evidence that your assumptions are correct.



And if we choose to believe your narrative, well, fukk them kids then, I guess that's the only solution you've offered.

 

[ISO]

You aren't explaining why any of this would keep their proven systems from working.

Why use these random excuses as reasons not to try the shyt that works, and instead advocate continuing with the status quo which clearly doesn't work?






It is 100% self-selected. Students only get into the school if they apply via lottery, and only something like 20% of the students in the lottery get in. Thus the only students who get in are those who have parents who know about the system and understand the processes to work it to get their kids in. That's what "self-selected" means. So before you even start, you are ensuring that the kids in the school are only a subset of the community most likely to succeed.

The status quo isn't working...like I said I'm not against learning from Finland but there's big implications if it doesn't work here because of the nature of this society, the education of million of children is in the balance that's why I tread carefully.

It's a lottery conducted at complete random and they draw a large number of applicants. What proof do you have that the selected parents have legs up above others or that they are gaming the system? Or that these parents are more knowledgable or understand the process more? I see everything from street nikkas to African dads in Muslim garb picking up their children in my neighborhood in the Bronx. The schools want to take more children, ideally they'd like the flip this shyt on its head, the teachers union and politicians are prohibiting them from expanding which is preventing them from taking more kids. A lot of NYC public schools have empty space and hallways because they are losing so much enrollment due to charter schools. The charter schools are taking the same damn kids, its common for a pair of siblings to go to a public school and their other sibling a charter school, located in the same building.

 

[Nikki_04]

I would be upset. This does not address the issue, it just creates more division. Doing something that will negatively impact some of the students and blaming you decision on black and latino students is not the answer.