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This is really personal for me.
As a kid, I was part of a "gifted and talented" program at my public elementary school, where I got to go to a different classroom for half a day once a week.
It was the first time in my life I'd been challenged mentally. Before that class, I didn't know how to do anything but survive. That early exposure to science and math gave me a real outlet for individual learning and achievement, something no adult in my life at the time was capable of offering me. The driven curious person I aspire to be today was born in that classroom.
My early childhood was not a nice time. In retrospect, that half day a week was the single solitary positive influence in my life. For years, it was the only thing I had to look forward to. I remember being sad when school was over for the summer, because it meant I didn't get to do it for awhile.
It genuinely scares me to think about what my life might be like if I hadn't had that one thing.
I remember a particular moment, being in classroom in third grade, thinking how we have been going over the same stuff again and again and again and being kind of pissed, and that I could really skip a grade or two. I thought this would be out of the question and never even bothered telling anyone anything about it.
Yeah, be very glad for these few hours per week.
> honors English classes that were eliminated because they didn’t enroll enough Black and Latino students.
What gripes me about this is that if they offered a Black History or Latino History class that didn't attract many white kids, that would (IMO) be okay.
> The district earlier this school year replaced the honors classes at Culver City High School with uniform courses that officials say will ensure students of all races receive an equal, rigorous education.
Are they also going to eliminate resources and courses devoted to special ed kids and adjust the curriculum accordingly to "ensure students of all races receive an equal, rigorous education"?
There's already been a movement in the last decade to integrate special ed kids into normal classrooms. My kids experience this today.
That’s because it’s less expensive than specialized care facilities.
>> honors English classes that were eliminated because they didn't enroll enough Black and Latino students.
How much of that can be explained by ESL speakers? California has an above average percentage of students whose language spoken at home isn't English and or who are themselves immigrants.
And is this one of these studies grouping Whites and Asians together (some activists started using the term "white adjacent" recently for that [0])?
>> The district earlier this school year replaced the honors classes at Culver City High School with uniform courses that officials say will ensure students of all races receive an equal, rigorous education.
"equally rigorous" can very well mean "dumbed down to the mean". It's actually what California aims to do by getting rid of advanced math classes (by grouping all students together the pass rate suddenly looks better for everyone! [1]). And that's not even touching some of the more controversial they plan to bring into the classroom. Now math is racist [2]
[0] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...
[1] https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
[2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
which is wild because I know the black community didn't ask for this
Are you sure? Mother's know that having "honors students" share space in a class with other students is supposed to help the other students. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the black community absolutely asked for this.
Ironically, all this does is decrease equity. Public schools may dumb down classes in this way, but private schools are unlikely to follow. For a smart kid, being from a wealthy family already confers a significant advantage, and this just makes matters worse.
Here in SF Lowell High School used to select students based on academic credentials. Activists now created a lottery system [0] and it's already lowering the bar for the material presented in class [1]. I guess now kids with money will just go to private school instead, and the smart, motivated students not picked up by the lottery will have to study "racially equitable math" [2] at the local public school, where advanced classes won't be available since they are deemed not equitable [3].
[0] https://thelowell.org/11314/features/lowell-freshmen-face-st...
[1] https://thelowell.org/9346/news/a-new-era-begins-the-controv...
[2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
[3] https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
It's a feature not a bug. These kind of things always protect incumbents, that's the reason behind all the modern woke stuff. It's like demanding regulations to prevent building on a lake "to protect the environment" after already building your cottage and boat launch
Yep. All my life the ladders for high achieving kids born to challenging circumstances have been being pulled up. I likely would be sentenced to working retail and fast food jobs my whole life if I was born today.
The public school system I attended has more or less ended every program I used back then, as far as I can tell.
It seems to be the goal of those implementing such things. If you are not of the right demographic, they simply do not want to see you succeed. I'm starting to believe it's outright maliciousness vs. naïve optimism.
> “I just don’t see how removing something from some kids all of a sudden helps other kids learn faster,” said Scott Peters, a senior research scientist at education research nonprofit NWEA who has studied equity in gifted and talented programs.
It's not supposed to, it's supposed to pull some students down so they can all be at the same level
If we described gifted brains as brains of color, honors classes would blossom.
Instead, let's punish gifted children for the brains they did not choose to be born with. No different than punishing children for their skin color.
Very different. You want the state to treat everyone as equals? Here you go, this is what you get.
I don't want the state to treat everyone as equals. I want the state to maximize quality of life for all. Those aren't the same.
We don't let the remedial math kids work at NASA for a reason.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way.
(Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron")
I first read Harrison Bergeron in 9th or 10th grade.... In a class for gifted kids.
I envision a future where people who care about their children's education flock to states that are "anti-woke". Students there will still have access to honors classes, will read classics, etc.
Anecdotally it's already started. I have some coworkers that are fleeing California for states like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas primarily for better school districts.
Except now Florida is fighting with the College Board over the contents of some AP classes they’re offering.
“Woke” and “Anti-Woke” are two sides of the same idiotic coin—you won’t be reading classics in either place. Neither side wants you to actually learn how to think for yourself, they both just want adherence to their ideology.
Seeing as the "Woke" side explicitly wants people to learn about american history, while the "anti-woke" crowd is banning books from classrooms, this "both sides same" narrative is garbage.
Also anecdotally, but out of friends that moved (to FL and SC) none are impressed with the local school districts. Seems like it's either homeschooling or private school route for them. To be fair, tuition at private schools is way more affordable compared to CA.
Meanwhile my family, including an actual teacher, that moved to florida has found their schooling to be abysmal, with the occasional private school that matches more boring states' public schools.
My state has very good education outcomes, despite being pretty damn poor, despite a population older than florida, and despite a shitload of blue collar families with very traditional opinions. It's very simple why: We require teachers to have a master's degree in teaching plus their subject, along with ~25 training days a year, strict expectations on experience and a requirement to take 15 credits worth of additional college classes on a regular basis.
The outcome, despite individual teachers making garbage money, and making even our dumbest students take the SAT, is that 9/10 of our students get a highschool diploma, and our full state's standardized test scores are higher than lots of states where things like the SAT are opt-in, meaning only college hopeful students take it. We also have very educated, intelligent, and talented teachers. My mother was a middle school french teacher, but the same qualifications that got her that job also allow her to be a french professor in pretty much any college. My chemistry teacher was a former nuclear physicist for the navy. My english teacher was recognized as on of the best in the state, despite living in a town of 9k people. Fully half of my high school class (100 kids, varying from farm kids to rich yuppie kids) were in "advanced" or honors or AP classes, including kids you would traditionally consider "class clowns" or otherwise uninterested in education.
If you were not interested in college, my high school had an entire vocational wing, where before you graduated you could get your CDL, your heavy equipment operators certification, you could learn to cook, you could learn to knit, you could become a licensed mechanic, you could learn how to manage a greenhouse or manage an entire farm, take prep classes for business school and go to national conventions, learn how to be an IT professional from never having used a computer in your life, or literally tens of other directions to become a trained professional.
When I went to school in one of those states it was pretty obvious that the honors classes were not more rigorous, but just a way to effectively continue segregation long after it had been made illegal. There was a slight complicating factor of class but even still it was very clear what was happening. The white children of farmers (who in rural areas are the upper class) were in the honors classes, the black and hispanic kids, along with most of the children of farm laborers were in the non-honors classes.
Having grown up in an environment like this I'm not so foolish as to take the leaders of those states or the general culture war right at face value. They want segregation again and this is the closest they can get. You don't have to buy into it either.
>When I went to school in one of those states it was pretty obvious that the honors classes were not more rigorous
When I went to school in one of those states, and taught in one of those states, it was pretty obvious that the honors/AP classes most definitely were more rigorous, and that is supported by the evidence of performance of these students in tests and college success.
>but just a way to effectively continue segregation long after it had been made illegal.
Ah yes, the classrooms with an overrepresention of Jews and Asians is a White supremacist ploy.
>There was a slight complicating factor of class but even still it was very clear what was happening. The white children of farmers (who in rural areas are the upper class)
The vast, vast majority of of White farmers in these states are at or below the poverty line. They are by no means "upper class".
>the black and hispanic kids, along with most of the children of farm laborers were in the non-honors classes.
This holds true anywhere in the US, even in the darkest blue areas of NYC and SF.
>Having grown up in an environment like this I'm not so foolish as to take the leaders of those states or the general culture war right at face value.
Definitely agree here about those in the "woke" areas.
>They want segregation again and this is the closest they can get.
This is what wokeism is calling for, safe spaces and segregation for BIPOCs.
>You don't have to buy into it either.
The redder states definitely are not.
Obviously the rich and privileged will just move their children to better schools, leaving only the poor to suffer from this lack of honors classes.
The only way to stop this nonsense is to massively cull school administrative bloat so people no longer have to justify their own pointless jobs with harmful "progress". Focus on educating children, not virtue signaling.
> In Santa Monica, Calif., high school English teachers said last year they had “a moral imperative” to eliminate honors English classes that they viewed as perpetuating inequality.
If this is simply a sound pedagogical choice, how is it a moral imperative? If it is a moral imperative, how can it be criticized?
A pedagogical choice wouldn't clip the wings of talented students to make others feel better. This is 100% DEI morals and it can be criticized for using race and ethnicity as a deterministic factor of hypothesized quality. This is race statistics gone wrong, only the DEI clubs cheer for it because it supports their current narrative.
Yeah... this entire conversation is getting weirdly racist.
Point here is... they seem to be acting based on... idk what data. But they are certainly experimenting, and I am not convinced it is in the right direction. Meanwhile we absolutely have functional educational models that could work to achieve every goal set out by this effort and more, but it involves elimination of private schools, making the rich go to the same schools as the poor (and no home-schooling). Because when you make everyone in society tied to the same educational system, everyone wins. But that's the one thing we are 100% unwilling to do under any circumstances.
For the wealthy, sending their kids to private school is easier and cheaper than improving the whole of the educational system. If Musk's kids had to go to the same school as kids with single parents who earn $30k a year and into the same classroom, you better believe Musk would invest enough money and pressure for the entirety of the school curriculum to be switched over to something meaningful and a classroom size of 7, and you better believe those teachers will be paid crazy money because Musk isn't gonna want his kids being taught by the worst teachers money could buy.
You might say "yeah well he can fly his kids to another country..." yeah convenience won't allow it.
Or, maybe people could make public schools so compelling that no one would have a reason to consider private or homeschooling.
That can't work. Public schools can never move as fast as private schools, and because a billionaire can influence an individual school they can always get better results.
You can't get change unless you make people tied to the system. If I can just up and leave I won't really care about making changes that benefit more than just myself. Unfortunately that's the only way to get the rich invested.
Meanwhile 23 Baltimore, Maryland schools had ZERO students that were proficient in math. I guess it’s easier to achieve equity by making everyone worse than making everyone better.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/02/11/report-23-baltimore-sc...
Socioeconomic background and familial attitudes towards education are both decent predictors of academic success. Why not focus on those as opposed to turning it into an issue of race?
I always assume it's because they're lazy and race is easy to observe and define, although even this is getting to be relative these days - my own fairly upper-middle-class half-white children are actually hispanic although nobody would be able to guess.
An attempt to blame low income (especially of color) families for their kids poor academic performance would be instant political suicide. Probably one of the fastest ways to end your career.
This is the equivalent of socialism and communism: everyone equally poor.
Yes exactly. "Equity" is one of those things that may sound good to zeroth order, but in reality always means everyone gets pulled down to the lowest tier, and the only way to get ahead is be the equivalent of an inner party member who gets a separate set of rules.
People look at capitalism and meritocracy and say people aren't equal under them, and it's true, but it's still the least bad system. It's easy to compare the problems of the current system to hypothetical ideals when advocating other approaches. The reality is, none of these equity ideas actually work in practice and they make everything way less equal and fair.
Everything is equal when everyone slows down and does less with no expectations.
"poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids"
-President Biden