To Increase Equity, School Districts Eliminate Honors Classes

[Secure Da Bag]

I would be upset honestly. I grew up in the honor school system. It's just what I know. Like most of you here.

But if I'm looking at it objectively, the trade-off would have to be: eliminate the honor/AP/IB system for an increase in resources and qualify of education for the entire school. In that scenario, it isn't bad at all.

 

[breakfuss]

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.

All it does is cause people with the means and options to pack up their kids and leave .

 

[Professor Emeritus]

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.

The fact that millions of children's lives are hanging in the balance is WHY we should model ourselves off of the proven research and systems which are performing far better. We know the status quo isn't working, so why continuing fukking over kids just because we think no chance is default better than radical change?

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?

I don't think you understand the point yet.

In every charter school lottery, the parents who apply for the lottery and the parents who don't apply for the lottery are not the same subpopulation. This is not a controversial claim - literally every charter school knows it and has known it for decades. The parents who apply are the ones who know about the charter systems, know how to fill out the applications, and jump through the right hoops in a competent manner. In that way the student bodies of these schools end up being a self-selected subset of the main student body. That's why charter schools with lottery systems outperform charter schools who take from a geographical area even when the same organization is running both schools.

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.

they are not the same kids. The ones who claim so publicly are only doing so for PR purposes. Running in the same school building has nothing to do with that. The question is whether or not you teach ALL the kids in that region or a particular non-random subset. Until you automatically enroll every child in the lottery, or shrink your geographical area so that every child in the area can attend your school, then it is not a valid comparison. No scientific study would ever accept results where the test subjects got to choose whether they were in the test group or the control group. Now, there are charter schools that actually do take in an entire geographic area. Those are the ones whose test results actually provide a valid comparison.

But all this is besides the point - I'm at a loss for what you're trying to prove with this example.


* We both agree that school reform is necessary

* We both agree that kids from poor backgrounds are capable of success too


You seem to be arguing that even regular kids from the inner city can succeed if placed in the right environment....so doesn't that support my point? How would the success of Success Academy invalidate anything I'm saying about the fact that pulling 10% of the kids out into the "good" program and leaving the rest to flounder is a bunch of bullshyt and we should instead work so that all 100% get the same resources?

 

[Lakers Offseason]

When people compare the US to Finland or any of those Scandinavian countries always sound goofy to me. Those countries are homogenous countries, people with the same culture, and values. Where in the US we have a multicultural society, with different groups of people with different culture and values.

Looking for an equality of outcome is the dumbest shyt people are pushing in education. This dude @Rhakim writing dissertations on why we gotta dumb education down so dumb/uninterested kids can keep up with the high achievers. fukking goofy as hell.

Calling African immigrant kids who do well and labeling them 'model minorities' to insult the fact our kids care about education. Man stfu. Plenty of black American kids do well because they have solid families. Are they model minorities too?

Why don't you look for solutions why these other kids are uninterested in school so they can get into honors and AP classes? Instead of removing these classes that provide the environment for kids who are highly motivated.

 

[Matriarchy Refugee]

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.

More disingenuous bullshyt.

The kids that improved did so because they were put into an after school program, aka something you consider an unfair advantage. They didn't magically get smarter because the gifted program got axed.

But guess what? A culture that values education would already be educating their children outside of a formal setting. It wouldn't need a special program to do a parent's job. A culture that values education would take charge of their children's academic fate. Not completely outsource it to the state.

 

[ISO]

The fact that millions of children's lives are hanging in the balance is WHY we should model ourselves off of the proven research and systems which are performing far better. We know the status quo isn't working, so why continuing fukking over kids just because we think no chance is default better than radical change?






I don't think you understand the point yet.

In every charter school lottery, the parents who apply for the lottery and the parents who don't apply for the lottery are not the same subpopulation. This is not a controversial claim - literally every charter school knows it and has known it for decades. The parents who apply are the ones who know about the charter systems, know how to fill out the applications, and jump through the right hoops in a competent manner. In that way the student bodies of these schools end up being a self-selected subset of the main student body. That's why charter schools with lottery systems outperform charter schools who take from a geographical area even when the same organization is running both schools.





Again, I have background with charter schools going back over 20 years and every single person knows they are not the same kids. The ones who claim so publicly are only doing so for PR purposes. Running in the same school building has nothing to do with that. The question is whether or not you teach ALL the kids in that region or a particular non-random subset. Until you automatically enroll every child in the lottery, or shrink your geographical area so that every child in the area can attend your school, then it is not a valid comparison. No scientific study would ever accept results where the test subjects got to choose whether they were in the test group or the control group. Now, there are charter schools that actually do take in an entire geographic area (like Green Dot in some of their schools), so it's possible to do. Those are the ones whose test results actually provide a valid comparison.

But all this is besides the point - I'm at a loss for what you're trying to prove with this example.


* We both agree that school reform is necessary

* We both agree that kids from poor backgrounds are capable of success too


You seem to be arguing that even regular kids from the inner city can succeed if placed in the right environment....so doesn't that support my point? How would the success of Success Academy invalidate anything I'm saying about the fact that pulling 10% of the kids out into the "good" program and leaving the rest to flounder is a bunch of bullshyt and we should instead work so that all 100% get the same resources?

I'd be more comfortable applying that research and those systems if the societies were more similar. Also, for radical change to occur you would have to fight the same forces that are restricting charter schools from expanding politically.

I disagree. They are the same kids. The student populace is wholly minority and almost entirely qualified to be considered impoverished, the common talking point that charters weed out English-language learners and students with disabilities yet the difference is less than one % when comparing the area charters to public schools. A lot of those students who don't get selected by the lottery and I'll tell you its a significant portion of these neighborhoods children end up in the public schools where they do worse. So what does that tell you? There parents knew how to fill out the applications, while I guess shows a level of education and involvement to you that helps lead to a child success, then why did it not translate? The difference is quality of teaching, better administration, real institutional identity, and school discipline. The lottery exists because there's limited slots due to space and funding. The bureaucracy, politicians, unions are fighting them on gaining real estate. How are Success and other NYC area charters going to enroll every child? Some have large buildings, others are taking a floor or half a floor in a public school building.

My argument is that we don't know how Finland's approaches, a much different society would translate. The point I was making was why look abroad when you can look at what charters are doing, the example I brought up of NYC statistically and by prevailing narratives is not supposed to occur. Some poor Harlem kids aren't supposed to outscore all public school children in NYC regardless of background.

 

[get these nets]

Thread got derailed. Snapshot of Culver City High School, the actual thread topic, shows that it performs better than average for the state.

2021–22 Smarter Balanced ELA and Mathematics Test Results at a Glance - CAASPP Reporting (CA Dept of Education)

Information about Smarter Balanced ELA and Mathematics Test Results

caaspp-elpac.ets.org

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I disagree. They are the same kids.

This is explicitly false. If you conducted a scientific study of ANY topic where the participants got to choose which group they would be in, your study would be automatically disqualified for selection bias. If on top of that, you required one group of participants to complete a length application process, while the other group just ended up where they were by default, then the editors would laugh at you and reject your study in an instant.

Self-selected students are not the same student body as the rest of students, and I can absolutely assure you that every charter school operator full well knows this.

A lot of those students who don't get selected by the lottery and I'll tell you its a significant portion of these neighborhoods children end up in the public schools where they do worse. So what does that tell you? There parents knew how to fill out the applications, while I guess shows a level of education and involvement to you that helps lead to a child success, then why did it not translate?

First off, it's false to claim they all do worse. There are plenty of kids who don't get chosen for the lottery who do go on to succeed anyway. High achievers will be high achievers regardless.

However, there are many that do worse in the public system....because through residential segregation, private schools, charter schools, and honors programs, you've pulled the vast majority of the high achievers out. And that's exactly the point I've been making to you this entire time. When you create systems that pull out most of the kids who are going to succeed, and leave the remainder in a depleted environment, then those low/mid achievers left in the depleted environment will do worse. That's the whole point.

The difference is quality of teaching, better administration, real institutional identity, and school discipline.

My argument is that we don't know how Finland's approaches, a much different society would translate. The point I was making was why look abroad when you can look at what charters are doing, the example I brought up of NYC statistically and by prevailing narratives is not supposed to occur. Some poor Harlem kids aren't supposed to outscore all public school children in NYC regardless of background.

Breh, I'll repeat to you again, I've worked with charters for over 20 years and if the things you claimed were a viable solution rather than buzzwords then they would have been implemented across the board decades ago. Of course we all agree that good teaching quality, good administration, meaningful institutional identity, and effective discipline are good for schools. No one denies that. But how do you achieve those things? Most charters achieve them by attracting the best talent and concentrating it in a narrow area. It does nothing to solve the larger issues, and in fact makes some of the larger issues worse because you're just draining the effective teachers/administrators from the other schools. But just saying "teach better, administrate better, discipline better, and get an identity" isn't a program for success or it would have already been successful.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

More disingenuous bullshyt.

I'm repeatedly referring to cited research and you're ignoring it. Who is bullshytting?

The kids that improved did so because they were put into an after school program, aka something you consider an unfair advantage.

When the hell did I call after-school programs an unfair advantage? I think after-school programs are great, I just think they should be available to all kids and not a pre-selected elite.

But guess what? A culture that values education would already be educating their children outside of a formal setting. It wouldn't need a special program to do a parent's job. A culture that values education would take charge of their children's academic fate. Not completely outsource it to the state.

Agreed, but what's your point? We don't have that. There is NO country in the world that has that. Not a single country on Earth has successfully educated their masses via non-public systems.

The entire question before us is how we are going to successfully educate children who don't already have advantages at home. You can repeat "Do better Black people!" as much as you want, but it looks juvenile and is obviously a waste of time. How are you going to actually improve the culture of those homes?



I think it's pretty hard, but there are several ways to go about it....and one of the main ways is to refuse to throw those kids into a ghetto where they have zero exposure to kids who are doing things the right way. It continues to perplex me that you claim the solution is to change the culture, and yet are advocating for systems that will do the exact opposite.

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

now that we got kids ourselves....i'm realizing how GREAT we had it and how shytty our kids are gettin it....the first time I heard they cut after school programs and learning manuscript I was pissed....

every other day its another budget related cut into this generations education....we may have been from the crack era walkin over glass viles and junkies on the street...but our schools loved us....

That’s due to generations of people blaming parents instead of evaluating the quality of education. Growing up it wasn’t my parents who taught me how to read. They were working. It was my good ass schools. We were in poor communities and I went to OUTSTANDING public, all black schools in the 90s.

But conservatives gutted our education system and convinced dummies to shift blame to parents and students instead of addressing the fukkery happening in a place where your children will spend 70% of their key developmental lives ages 4-18.

8 hrs a day
5 days a week
180 days a year

Your child will be in these goofy, racist buildings not learning anything, getting tested until they wanna commit that, not learning any authentic skills, getting told they suck and bored out of their minds. 80% of their teachers will not look like them. Their teachers will be starving on meager teacher pay, expected to work upwards of 80 hrs a week. They will be mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically abused until they burn out and switch positions.

And god forbid your children are boys. Who like to move. Who like dynamic lessons. And hands-on learning. And then God help us if they are black boys in a school system where 80% of the teachers are PAWGs who will claim these boys have learning disabilities simply for being boys. They’ll set them up for the school-to-prison pipeline quite nicely.

But no one will address these issues. They’ll just tell overworked parents that it’s their fault. They won’t pay teachers more or use research-based learning strategies that actually work, or provide incentives to bring talented black male teachers to classrooms.

NOPE. Just shift blame to taxpayers for the systems they are paying into being a failure. Collectively as a nation, it’s what we deserve because we’re allowing it.

Burning books. Eroding civil rights. Taking Black history from the curriculum. Facism starts in the education system.

There’s a reason why they tortured slaves for trying to learn how to read. Ah well. All shyt I’ve said before ad naseum. I’m done trying to save the world. I’m going to homeschool my baby.

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

"When schools and other education institutions move to de-track mathematics classrooms, opportunities for student learning increase. Evidence for this fact comes from a number of different research studies that show that high-achieving students achieve at the same levels in tracked and untracked groups but that middle- and low-achieving students score at significantly higher levels when they are not working in tracks (Boaler, 2002, 2008a; Burris, Heubert, & Levin, 2006; Nunes, Bryant, Sylva, & Barros, 2009)."

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

"The body of research is made up of a variety of different studies looking at the academic effects of separation for gifted and high-achieving students, including research on de-tracking efforts, gifted programs, and alternative approaches to enrichment. The common finding across these studies is that a system of sorting and separating students based on academic level is neither necessary nor particularly helpful for supporting gifted and high-achieving students."

"More than a dozen studies across four decades point to a clear result: academic tracking—the practice of sorting students based on perceived academic ability into different classes—harms the students assigned to lower levels. Students placed in lower-level classes show reduced achievement over time when compared with peers who had similar initial achievement levels but who received access to higher-level courses.

At the same time, research has shown that the performance of students with greater initial achievement is not hurt by de-tracking. High-quality de-tracking programs achieve this result by “leveling up” the curriculum to give more students access to challenging coursework and supporting teachers in the process. For example, Rockville Center School District in Long Island, New York, expanded their international baccalaureate (IB) program from serving just a select group of top-track students to reach all high school students. Some in the community were worried that the district’s “top” students would suffer from being in classrooms that now included lower-achieving peers. But these students continued to achieve high scores on their IB exams under the new de-tracked model, and, in fact, the overall proportion of students scoring at the highest levels on exams increased."



There's a lot more there:

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

It’s not just the tracking that can be hurtful. It’s teacher perceptions of their students that hinder their growth too.

Most honors teachers don’t merely teach AP courses. Most teacher one or two sections of AP and then they have regular classes. The idea that you are going to save all the rigorous, engaging content and activity for “gifted students” and give basic shyt to the other kids has always been problematic.

The reality is that teachers aren’t properly equipped to differentiate instruction for students. They are not trained to make learning engaging, authentic, and relevant to their students’ lives. So we try to separate students and that hasn’t worked so far. Instead, raise the standards across the board.
No teacher should still be lecturing for hours and hours on end. If teachers were trained to get away from teacher-centered instruction and shifted to student-centered pedagogy, they’d see a huge difference in student achievement across the board.

But those changes actually start with a player people don’t even consider: higher ed.

In many cases, teacher preparation and training programs themselves are ran by crotchety, old, racist professors who barely know how to teach. They give boring ass lectures to future teachers and haven’t been in a k-12 classroom in centuries. So teachers get this training and it’s passed to a poor k-12 kid in a school near you.

Zero classroom management training, zero lesson planning training, zero culturally sustaining pedagogy training, zero critical race theory training…just give ‘em worksheets and if they don’t sit down and shut up “ITS THE PARENT’S FAULT!”

We deserve the sorry country we got because we stupid enough to blame ourselves for systems we pay into instead of having the balls to hold them accountable.

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

@Rhakim rep on recharge

 

[old pig]

yikes bad idea smh

 

[Matriarchy Refugee]

I'm repeatedly referring to cited research and you're ignoring it. Who is bullshytting?






When the hell did I call after-school programs an unfair advantage? I think after-school programs are great, I just think they should be available to all kids and not a pre-selected elite.





Agreed, but what's your point? We don't have that. There is NO country in the world that has that. Not a single country on Earth has successfully educated their masses via non-public systems.

The entire question before us is how we are going to successfully educate children who don't already have advantages at home. You can repeat "Do better Black people!" as much as you want, but it looks juvenile and is obviously a waste of time. How are you going to actually improve the culture of those homes?



I think it's pretty hard, but there are several ways to go about it....and one of the main ways is to refuse to throw those kids into a ghetto where they have zero exposure to kids who are doing things the right way. It continues to perplex me that you claim the solution is to change the culture, and yet are advocating for systems that will do the exact opposite.

It continues to perplex me that you think fukking gifted and talented programs are getting in the way of changing our asanine cultural values.

Not the neglectul and incompetent parents and broken families, not the street culture we valorize, not the ignorant music we listen to religiously, not the shifting of responsibility to "society", not all the coddling you so called progressives do for the neglect and incompetent parents, no, none of that is getting in the way.

It's those goddamn honors classes.

 

[ISO]

This is explicitly false. If you conducted a scientific study of ANY topic where the participants got to choose which group they would be in, your study would be automatically disqualified for selection bias. If on top of that, you required one group of participants to complete a length application process, while the other group just ended up where they were by default, then the editors would laugh at you and reject your study in an instant.

Self-selected students are not the same student body as the rest of students, and I can absolutely assure you that every charter school operator full well knows this.






First off, it's false to claim they all do worse. There are plenty of kids who don't get chosen for the lottery who do go on to succeed anyway. High achievers will be high achievers regardless.

However, there are many that do worse in the public system....because through residential segregation, private schools, charter schools, and honors programs, you've pulled the vast majority of the high achievers out. And that's exactly the point I've been making to you this entire time. When you create systems that pull out most of the kids who are going to succeed, and leave the remainder in a depleted environment, then those low/mid achievers left in the depleted environment will do worse. That's the whole point.







Breh, I'll repeat to you again, I've worked with charters for over 20 years and if the things you claimed were a viable solution rather than buzzwords then they would have been implemented across the board decades ago. Of course we all agree that good teaching quality, good administration, meaningful institutional identity, and effective discipline are good for schools. No one denies that. But how do you achieve those things? Most charters achieve them by attracting the best talent and concentrating it in a narrow area. It does nothing to solve the larger issues, and in fact makes some of the larger issues worse because you're just draining the effective teachers/administrators from the other schools. But just saying "teach better, administrate better, discipline better, and get an identity" isn't a program for success or it would have already been successful.

1. It is not false. The students in the school as far as demographics go match that of the public schools by major metrics whether its racial/ethnic background, family income and educational attainment, and special ed and language learners. The charters have to use a lottery system because they don't have the buildings or space required to take on every child in the community or the cash which you keep ignoring. These are the same children, many come from the same families as their public school counterparts whether they be siblings or cousins. This "at length application" you're talking about is nothing but a basic application not to different than what you would have to fill out to enroll your child in a public school. This group "choosing" where they want to be is that what you call a large % of parents from Harlem, Bed-Stuy, and the South Bronx filling out a charter school application?

2. Yes, there are kids who to go public school and excel, and some who go to the charter and don't. That public school child in the charter would probably learn even more and vice versa. The point is that as a whole the charter school children of NYC are vastly outperforming the public school children of NYC especially in the same neighborhoods in which they operate and have even outperformed white public school children in affluent suburban areas in some cases. These schools are doing this with less per pupil spending than the public schools and with a student populace of economically disadvantaged black and brown children, some are doing it in the exact same building as the public schools with even less space some time occupying half a school floor and not having access to all the buildings facilities. How is it that two schools operating in the same building yet the difference just in how children transition from class to class in the hallways is pronounced? How would you know that the charter has "weeded out high achievers" if they're starting in Kindergarten and the school does not admit based on testing? The school is what creates these high achievers with its pedagogy and structure and parent relationship building and expectation.

3. They can't implement these things because of politicians, unions, and ideological wars. One thing schools like Success do is ax incompetent teachers, these same teachers could potentially cost six figures in litigation to fire from the public school system. Good luck implementing as you say a standard in teaching when shyt like that is the norm.