WSJ: School Districts Eliminate Honors Classes

Parents Forum
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Well it depends what you mean by college prep. Are they prepping for community college or MIT?

Public schools are not held accountable for gifted students or programs. In contrast, they are very accountable for students not meeting minimum grade standards. Expect teachers to focus on the 25% who fail to do so in every English class there. Frankly, that is the only tactic that is measured and attributed to the teacher so the focus makes sense. Honors kids presumably passed that state test so had a different focus before.

Good luck to those impacted by this change.

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do you have a citation for the economic status of the former Honors Language Arts class?

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A bit of both, and a lot of everything in between. It runs the gamut but plenty of top schools are represented. And again, local knowledge helps. Community college in California is not joke. Rather it is a viable and affordable path to a four year degree from an excellent institution.

But if parents believe their kids are just too advanced to have 9th grade English with a kid who might attend Santa Monica Community College on their way to UCB, UCLA or another quality school . . . then maybe public school education in these thriving, diverse communities isn’t the best option.

Just what I know about the demographics of the areas, and what have read and heard locally about the reasons for the change.

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I think you have hit on something important with this statement. I think that part of the difference in viewpoints we are seeing on this thread is due to some posters “believing in” the existence of gifted children, and others feeling it is mainly an artifact of wealth.

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Weirdly, despite living many states away, I do have some local knowledge. A friend of mine is a professor at Santa Monica and is partnered with a K-12 public school teacher in the area. They have chosen to send their children to private school.

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I think there is a big difference between truly gifted and smart. My D was identified as gifted but honestly she was an early bloomer in a home with lots of books and parents who were well educated who emphasized education. She’s the average excellent kid we talk about on CC a lot. A few grade levels ahead in math and reading, top 1% standardized tests, but to me, that’s a function of opportunity and maturation rate.

We had three truly gifted kids in our extended circle. One was reading complex scientific words before the age of 2, one had a didactic memory, and the other was doing complex math beyond calculus before leaving elementary school. Just crazy off the charts.

IMO, the later group are very rare. All three skipped grades and one could have gone to college at age 14 but the parents put the brakes on.

I think what most schools are dealing with are kids more like mine - early bloomers vs truly truly gifted.

I think there just isn’t enough flexibility in how we set up our public schools. I get there is a lot of value being with same age peers, but much of the resource issue would go away if we had mixed aged classrooms.

And yes, I do think we need to meet the needs of all kids and do away with the gate keeping.

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Both high schools have a surprisingly high percentage of students on the free or reduced price lunch program (Santa Monica 35%, Culver City 40%) so I expect most students don’t have a lot of alternatives.

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In many places, this type of comment reflects students’ physical and emotional fear of the hotheads, druggies, and gangbangers that the school can’t tame because
public schools can’t kick them out.

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So the students of privileged households can either flight to private schools that do offer advanced curriculum or supplement what the school isn’t teaching with paid extracurricular learning opportunities, or get their students dual enrolled, etc. And the under privileged students who otherwise could have been in advanced classes will be left at the school no longer teaching them without the economic means for some of those opportunities and in some cases without the active parental support to supplement their education. How is that advancing equity?

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I have been following this thread, but stayed out of it becuase I have so many thoughts; some of my thoughts even contradict each other or at least make this a really complex topic. Also because it would be challenging for me to discuss tracking without either writing endless paragraphs or revealing too much personal information. And I guess that I find some of the back and forth debating pretty tiresome and reductionist. Both the (tracking = good/no tracking = bad) AND the (tracking = bad/no tracking = good) sides dismiss the concerns of people who disagree with their point of view.

All of that said, I wanted to address your point:

I believe in the existence of gifted children. I know some profoundly gifted children and young adults. And I don’t think it is always about wealth. However, I also believe that a lot of children who are identified as gifted and near gifted are just intelligent children who have been given a lot of opportunities.

In general, I think tracking in high school can be done thoughtfully and responsibly and serve students well. But I am highly aware of the problematic ways that has been used in the past and continues to be used in some schools. I have also witnessed the bias of teachers towards students who have been labeled as unintelligent, badly-behaved, and not worthy of advanced instruction. Children who could be strong students are sometimes written off early by their schools based on other factors including stereotyping, and once written off, there is almost no way to recover the lost learning or rekindle a child’s love of learning/intellectual curiosity. In my observation, this type of writing children off too soon is caused by educators who have feelings of animosity towards certain groups but also by educators who pity certain kids and thus don’t truly challenge them. Identifying a child’s strengths and weaknesses requires being clear-eyed and constantlychecking one’s assumptions in a way that is hard to do with the millions of other dynamics going on in the classroom in any given day.

As long as some advocates of tracking refuse to acknowledge the role that bias (and parent entitlement) plays in the classroom, it is hard for me to take their arguments seriously. I don’t have a problem with tracking by itself. I have a problem that advocacy for tracking seems to be often bundled with a set of beliefs, statements, and assumptions that I see as not just elitist (I can live with that) but also willfully blind to the other forces at play in the U.S
 And these are the forces that tend to disproportionately impact the least fortunate of students in a school system.

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There’s a mix of all kinds of kids with different needs. And I know you know this
 but just to add to your post. It’s not just regular kids, early bloomers / average excellent kids, and gifted. Some may start out as late bloomers, but might be earnest hard workers who could catch up and fit into the advanced group later on (my kid turned out to be one of these). Some kids are smart but don’t care about learning or have some other issue that makes them disruptive to the class. Some kids have a mixture of strengths and disabilities.

I am not a teacher, so I don’t know the best way to meet everyone’s needs
 but what I do know is that it’s got to be challenging to meet the needs of all these kids in a public school environment, where there is no other place to send the kids that don’t fit. There are more variables than just what level of math a kid is studying.

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Yep, and this is why I haven’t weighed in :grin:

I’ll just say that we have never been too worried about which schools our kids attend, though there are circumstances where we would be (primarily social/safety).

They VERY creatively redrew the boundaries in our neighborhood to send the kids from the fancy houses to the rich kid school, and the apartment kids to the poor school. The gerrymandering was clear as day.

Our house is disproportionately pricier than our nearby neighbors’ (was built much later). Our kids attended the poorest elementary school in our town, which we considered a feature, not a bug, when we bought our house. Our school district is very good in general.

We decided when they were very young that they would be fine as the children of 2 science professors, and that we weren’t going to sweat it much. We were considering whether or not to try to fast-track our eldest even more than he already was (his bday would have forced him into the next grade in our current town). Okay, so he goes +2 math (with all the transportation woes), takes BC calc junior year, and then what? Who cares? We decided against it and everything has been more than fine.

He complained about being bored in school a decent amount and that was a chance for us to teach him some good lessons about life. Like how to not be arrogant.

Having a lot of different course options available to high schoolers is good, and I’m grateful for it. I actually like how our school district does things – it could be a lot worse. We managed to talk our freshman out of honors algebra II for next year. He was relieved that it wouldn’t affect his ability to take calculus. (Though I question the utility of offering both an algebra II regular and algebra II honors class). The school can offer flexibility because they’re pretty wealthy. One of my kids has disabilities and an IEP and his special ed teachers are absolute gems. We need more of them.

Lots of good points made in this thread, and I can see all the sides of the issues. But the fact is that my kids are going to be a-ok in just about any school. I’m much more worried about many of their classmates. I am happy for resources that are devoted to helping kids who need it the most, even at the expense of my own children (who are and will be fine with a somewhat smaller slice of the resource pie).

ETA: it’s not a coincidence that all the kids in the super secret +2 math program are professors’ kids :eyes:

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Our school allows kids to step up 2-3 years especially for math – i.e., a 6th grade kid in 8th grade math if they feel it is warranted. You can get to Calc BC by 9th or 10th if you are comfortable. Usually it is these kids that are 2 years ahead that end up topping the class with the older kids, interestingly. They don’t think this is needed for most other subjects. They let kids take AP CS A in 9th grade, and they built a curriculum beyond that for the following three years. I think mixed age classrooms can work well. Don’t think this needs more resources.

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I as thinking more in terms of getting the advanced reader and the struggling reader a library card and maybe some suggestions, but parents always have the option of doing whatever they want to enhance their kid’s equation.

Where I disagree, though, is with the idea that the kids at these schools would not be exposed to an “advanced curriculum.” These schools offer APs and Honors courses in English starting in 11th grade, same as the private schools to which the parents might flee. And the assumption that these classes will be remedial level and useless just isn’t supported by the facts as I understand them. These aren’t kids in a failed system, as some have claimed. For example, SaMo sends 90% to college, ranks is in the top 7% of CA schools on the tracking tests, and the mean SAT ERB score is 647 (1275 total). These aren’t bad numbers for a non-magnet, non-charter, open enrollment school in an economically diverse area.

Some parents may want more or different for a variety of reasons, but frankly whether or not the school offers Honors English probably isn’t going to tip the scales in that regard, especially because the top private schools in the area don’t over Honors English in 9/10 either.

To be clear, I am not opposed to tracking in many circumstances, but I also don’t find the idea of teaching 9/10 grade kids together in an English course to necessarily be an affront against education of the kid’s whose parents think they ought to be in honors. Some schools are equipped to do it this way, and do it well and with benefit to all the students.

I agree with just about everything else you posted, but add the fact that we are talking about publicly funded education, and some of the points you make even become more stark. IMO.

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For the schools mentioned in the WSJ article, lack of resource doesn’t appear to be an issue or the cause in their decisions to eliminate honors classes.

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Confused. Is not being arrogant a benefit of boredom? I certainly hope not. If my kid were bored in class then there is something wrong. They certainly aren’t learning–they’re wasting their time.

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No it’s not. But we weren’t that worried about his complaints of being bored. This gave us opportunities to talk to him about how it comes across to others to complain about how the classes are boring and not challenging. We harped on him about being grateful that it comes easily to him, and how it will make your classmates feel bad about themselves if you communicate that stuff out loud. We also reminded him of other categories where he does struggle (including socially). He is prepared that college will challenge him and humble him. He knows that his less academically-inclined friends have plenty of things to teach him about life etc. They are a diverse and mutually supportive group. He was at risk of becoming arrogant due to his low social awareness and high academic performance. He is not an arrogant kid at all, and we are so proud of that. Far more than we are about any of his accomplishments.

For example, he was not challenged by a poorly-taught honors geometry class, but the other kids in his class small group were very much so. My son barely had any friends at that time, and didn’t know the kids in his group. He used it as an opportunity to encourage and help those in his group. They formed a group chat to vent and to support each other. They rallied around one kid who the teacher denigrated.

He was very careful not to say anything to them about being bored in the class (though he did to us at home). They got together to burn their notes in solidarity that summer. They facetimed him while he was in the hospital and went out of their way to keep in touch while he barely left the house due to illness sophomore year. We were so grateful. They have become his closest friends and they are fantastic kids. That’s all borne out of him recognizing that his boredom in that class was no big deal, biting his tongue about it with his peers, and using it as a chance to be a kind and helpful human.

That’s an example of the silver lining of being bored and learning to deal with it constructively. Should we have tried to get him into the next level of math? I don’t think that would have been important.

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Well, for many people that type of social awareness and self-knowledge of dealing with others of various abilities can come from sports activities or extracurriculars, religious activities, Scouts, or art/dance/music class, but if your son acquired it in a mediocre math class, that is fine. Just pointing out he didnt necessarily need mediocre math to acquire those skills.

Nor do all students react to boredom in the same way.

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You’re correct. My kid is an uncoordinated atheist, a self-described “inside boy”, and a terrible artist. All his EC’s are academic teams. So we were grateful so much good came from his mediocre math class.

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Just out of curiosity, he wasn’t required to participate on an athletic team or in arts/drama classes for at least a few years in high school? Plenty of kids get exposure that way.