Our high school requires all kids in the advanced math track to work in the tutoring center for a certain number of hours. Some of the other advanced classes also require tutoring hours. My son enjoys teaching and tutoring. My daughter, not so much.
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My S refused to go the peer tutor path, but it was not a requirement.
Our D tried being a peer tutor for algebra but gave up after a few weeks. She shook her head and said the students were not in any way ready for algebra. Most of the tutor time spent on multiplication and division.
Perhaps someone wants to start a separate thread to discuss tutoring / TA positions
A couple of years ago, in a bid to address the issue of students from certain demographics being under-represented in what you would consider Honours or College-Prep courses and thus prohibiting them from being able to apply to university, the Ontario government decided to start implementing a shift in postponing streaming from grade 9 to 11. At the time the model had 3 streams for the core academic courses starting in grade 9, though most students were tracked into 1 of 2, either āAcademicā leading to the university track for grades 11 & 12 or āAppliedā leading to the college track (where College in Canada is more equivalent to Community College in the US but not exactly). College track courses are not acceptable for admission to university, so student enrolled in the Applied stream in grade 9 were effectively shut out from attending university (though pathways did exist for moving up to the Academic stream it would appear that in practice it happened rarely). Students were recommended to either the Academic or Applied stream by their grade 8 teacher though it was only a suggestion. If parents disagreed with the recommendation they were free to place their child in whichever stream they preferred. The feeling was that despite this, parents from certain demographic backgrounds were less knowledgeable regarding the process or less inclined to over rule the recommendations that predominantly resulted in students from certain minorities and socio-economic backgrounds to being disproportionately recommended to Applied level courses due to teacher bias.
Thus the move to de-streaming began 2 years ago with it being completed this school year. All students are now placed into the same level for their core academic courses for grades 9 & 10. The plan as outlined was that a new curriculum was to be developed for these classes which would be conducted at the āAcademicā level. Then in grade 11 students are free to choose either the University or College pathway. As I no longer have students in high school I havenāt heard how the implementation has been going or how students in regional choice programs like AP and IB are being accommodated as at least at S21ās high school the AP program ran an accelerated curriculum in grades 9 & 10.
I should note that Ontario apparently at the time was I believe the only remaining province that streamed students in grade 9 with the other provinces doing so in grade 11.
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How is it working? Does it cut down on discipline problems? Does it appear at least to elevate education for all? Iāve always thought that you should be able to have real school choice. It certainly seems that it would make schools accountable.
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We have some personal experience with this sort of transition as our public HS shifted away from honors English in 9th and 10th while our kids were enrolled (after one went through and before the other).
We had some concerns but it worked out well and Iād say the result years later has been very good, measured not just in terms of equity but in terms of academic development for all levels of students.
The change was teacher driven. Before the switch, kids were routed into a few honors sections based on middle school teacher suggestion. Parents could override, and many did (usually not because the kids were particularly bright or interested).
This left out a lot of very bright students who either didnāt click with the middle school teacher, developed late, had the interest but not the academic development/polish, and/or didnāt have aggressive parents who felt they knew better than the teacher.
The problem was that these patterns became hard to break out of. Due to scheduling logistics, the honors kids often ended up in the same history, math, foreign language classes. They tended to clump together and pursue the same pathways, not just in English but in other subjects. Non-honors kids tended to avoid AP/IB when the time came. Teachers saw bright non-honors kids that they had trouble convincing AP classes were for them, too. Even though there wasnāt formal tracking preventing anyone from taking AP classes in 11th, the effect was the same.
After the switch things were much more open and a wider range of students started pursuing AP courses. More subjects and sections were added and the courses themselves were more robust. We didnāt see any watering down. The opposite, if anything.
In addition, our experience was that most of the teachers found ways to adapt to the range they had in the English classes. In-class differentiation, etc. Some of them added additional readings and discussion groups open to all who were interested. Frankly, those were better experiences than what took place in honors classes prior.
As far as college admission and the like, we didnāt see any reduction in terms of acceptances to strong academic schools or preparation once there. If I had to choose a model Iād take the new system over the old, even if my only goal was to ensure my own academically strong kids got the best education.
I went to a ton of meetings about this and I have to say that when the teachers explained the rationale and responded to parent questions, a lot of the types of concerns that I see mentioned in this thread (will they do away with all differentiation, drop AP classes, etc) just melted away. And yes, the word equity was part of the discussion, as some of the historical patterns tended to correlate to race, ethnicity, SES, living situation. But it was never equity vs. developmentally appropriate education. It was about how we develop pathways that provide appropriate education for all.
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Sounds like your school didnt have the disruption/discipline problems other schools have encountered
Thank you for sharing! I think you had a unique perspective with having children go through both models.
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I guess I fundamentally object to the depiction of non-honors classes for freshman being some hell hole in which our āadvancedā children are paragons of perfect behavior who will be destroyed by having to learn in an environment in which ānon-advancedā children are all behaving like animals. I meanā¦I guess itās possible that you are in a district where thatās true? In my experience itās just not that cut and dried, and our kids did well in part because they learned to navigate an educational experience that has had bumps in the road. Has definitely prepared them well for large flagship public colleges! And ā in my opinion ā life.
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I dont think it has anything to do with academic ability or SES. I think it has a lot to do with who wants to be there. By high school, there are plenty of students who do not have primarily academic values. Maybe they value sports, or hands-on training, or interaction with children, their own or others. Not everyone is primarily academically oriented, and that is ok.
As currently set up, there isnt much room in some public schools to accomodate that, so students with varying level of motivation sometimes can be grouped together with varying results. Sometimes it doesnt matter. Sometimes one unmotivated student can disrupt the education of 25 others. That is less likely to happen in an honors class, which an unmotivated student is less likely to enroll in to begin with. The problem goes away in college because the unmotivated are excluded or exclude themselves voluntarily. They canāt do that in high school as attendance is required.
I am sure the vast majority of kids in any class are fine humans and would be great to interact with. But the disruption/discipline problem is more likely to occur from an unmotivated student and be tolerated in the regular class.
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We are in the same district as you are, I believe. Universal 9th grade classes worked well for one of our kids, but not so well for the other very similar kid who happened to have several classes with many badly behaving kids. When you are in a large public school, there can be a bit of luck of the draw involved in which kids are going to end up in your kidās classroom, and also whether your kid is lucky to have a teacher skilled at dealing with badly behaved 9th or 10th graders.
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In AZ, the charter schools all receive public school funding. And they are not allowed to have entrance exams for admission. They are allowed to have exams for stuff like which math class youād go into, for example.
I know that in our old neck of the woods, our local schoo district was losing enough kids to all of the charter schools that in our old neighborhood, the district opened a new K-8 STEM-focused public school. Now that school is the primo one in the district to get your kids into. It, too, has open enrollment available.
I know that open enrollment for charter schools has enabled our kids to get a boarding school quality education for $0.00. From K-4th grade for D26 (grades 2-6 for D24), we drove 45 min each way to and from school for it. Totally worth it. Had we lived in CA, that would not even be an option. They still attend a charter in the same group of charter schools, just in a different part of the state than where they started in elementary school.
When the charter school opened in elementary school, the principal said that the charter group tried to open a campus in CA but met with resistance because it requires local school board to ok it. And none of the school districts there want to agree to more competition. So they focused instead on charters mostly in AZ, TX, and now LA.
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Some of the charter schools in AZ are extremely successful. When our S16 was accepted to Stanford we attended an accepted students reception. The total number of students accepted from AZ was like 18. The vast majority were from certain charter schools in Phoenix and Tucson.
I do not know if it is still the case, but back then the state funds going to charter schools per student were less than what was given to public schools. Telling.
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I canāt speak for how it has gone in AZ, but I live in a different state where open enrollment is big; in our state, about 10% of students are open enrolled. In our state, open enrollment creates winners and losers on the district level. Our district is a āwinner.ā Almost 40% of our students are open enrolled from out of district, bringing $26 million of revenue/yr from their home districts. School districts function as economies of scale, and our district is now huge and extremely āefficient.ā Each new student costs our district less than half of the money they bring with them. Part of the reason is because we donāt have to provide transportation to out-of-district students, another reason is that very few of the students are āexpensiveā students, such as students with special needs or non-English speaking. For a family to open-enroll, they need 2 things: 1) reliable transportation 2) to sign up early because the law requires either a first-come-first-serve or lottery policy to select students. Our district has chosen first-come-first-serve. Some families sign up years in advance! Obviously, both of these requirements essentially shut out low income families. In addition, our district has been known to advertise to families in neighboring high-income neighborhoods, but not to low income ones, which definitely exacerbates the inequities. Neighboring districts have been gutted. Does it cut down on discipline problems? Depends on where you look! There are essentially none in our district, but the districts that have been gutted are awful.
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My Dās HS was part of that cityās voucher program. It had a ton more diversity and students on free lunch than her public HS but it was competitive entry based on an entrance exam, grades and teacher recommendations, and the bar for behavior was high.
Good points here. Our oldest was the class right before U9, but still there was no such thing as honors/advanced English or Social Studies under the old format. He had some meh experiences and some great ones depending on the kids and the teacher. That remained true even as he got to AP courses within his small learning community later on. D23 had a mostly great experience in U9 except ā ironically based on this thread 
ā in 9th grade English where indeed there were some especially rowdy boys who made life kind of hellish for the teacher. That said, teacher handled them decently well and daughter actually got a lot out of the class still ā maybe more life skills and managing annoying boys than anything else, though that certainly hasnāt harmed her progression through subsequent AP-level English classes. She laughs a lot about that class now, looking back on it.
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I have friends and family who have had this experience, but in honors/advanced courses. It may be a different type of misbehavior, but there are plenty of entitled, disruptive kids who take honors courses, try to intimate and bully other students and sometimes even teachers, stifle discussions, etc. Effective teaching is hard, and having a great experience is often the luck of the draw whether honors or not.
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I agree completely with this, and I guess that was part of the point I was trying to make: that people often form an opinion on this issue based on the experiences of their own kids, and this can have a big element of luck of the draw.
Our first child had a great non-honors 9th grade Physics for example, while my younger childās experience in the same class (different teacher) has been simply awful, with kids bullying the teacher as well as other students. It isnāt really a positive learning experience in any way. If this had been my first childās experience in 9th grade, our family might have given up on the public school at that point. As it is, we are now a more seasoned public school family, we know there is a lot of value in this school, and are able to do better helping our younger child than we would have known to do with our firstā¦
ā¦ while at the same time, I still do wish we could have given her a better experience with more learning and less troublesome behavior. Mixed feelings, really. Teaching is hard, and parenting is hard too!
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So better school showed up in direct response to loss of students (and corresponding funds)? Basically people āvoted with their feetā and got a positive response?
Can we please stop referring to the non-honors, lower SES higher URM classes as āzoos.ā It is offensive.
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