Honors for none
- Joanne Jacobs
- May 14
- 2 min read
Most of what I learned in elementary and junior high school came from reading books in class under my desk. If teachers hadn't let me do that, I might have died of boredom. ("Gifted" classes hadn't been invented, though my fourth-grade teacher accelerated the hell out of the advanced reading and math group.)
In high school, I had to pay attention because I was in "Level 1" classes that were challenging. My classmates were all smart and motivated. Even in math and science, not my strong suits, it was fun.
Ditching honors classes in the name of "equity" is a bad idea, writes Rikki Schlott in the New York Post. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto Unified will dump honors biology classes and place all freshmen in the same "foundational" course, she notes. "Honors English has already been sidelined."
The board voted for "de-laning" in January, but it's become an issue this week, because Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman in the area, tweeted against the idea: “It is absurd that [the] Palo Alto School district just voted to remove honors biology for all students and already removed honors English," Khanna wrote. "They call it de-laning. I call it an assault on excellence.”
Why is a liberal Democrat with ambitions for higher office coming out for "excellence" over "equity" just now? Every day, California Gov. Gavin Newsom walks back another policy from clearing homeless camps to limiting health benefits for the undocumented. Are the Democrats going to Make California Great Again?
Tracking fell out of favor decades ago. Lower tracks are less challenging and sometimes get the less-capable teachers. Students may decide they're "not a math person" or "not a science person." In theory, less-capable and less-motivated students will learn more in classes with high achievers. In practice . . . Well, I think it helps some students, but mostly it requires teachers to lower expectations or ignore the fast learners to focus on the average and slow learners. It means a lot more work for teachers, and more time for students like me to read books, chat with friends or stare at their phones.
When my daughter was a freshman at Palo Alto High School in 1995, I looked at her schedule and said, "This is no good. You need an English class. You'll need to drop 'Critical Thinking,' whatever that is."
"Critical Thinking," she told me, was the new name for English. It was honors English for students willing to do some extra work, and regular English for everyone else. That worked out OK, in part because there were so many good students in the class.
Math was so heavily tracked there were two levels of honors. My daughter struggled in high honors, but did well in regular honors.
It's probably feasible to do a certain amount of tracking within a classroom if the students are well-behaved and the class is modest-sized (that's basically how the old one-room schoolhouse worked, with one teacher and students of various ages mostly given assignments appropriate to their intellectual development and asking questions when necessary--and hell to pay for the kid who acted up in class if the teacher spoke to a parent). But it won't work in a class with 35 poorly-behaved, entitled narcissists (whose parents will question, if not scream about, every suggestion their child is not the center of the teacher's universe).
No one is school management has the ability to operate a fully tracked education system without getting into political trouble. My personal history was seeing the children of community leaders put into the top track in order to avoid being in classes with too many minorities but that was decades ago.
In my third year of teaching, "gifted" classes were eliminated in favor of "differentiation in the classroom." For me, that meant three reading groups, four spelling groups, and three math groups. The once a week pull-out gifted classes were filled with white children and most of them - boys (that's a different story). Can't have that, of course; I was told it was elitest and racially suspect. Anyway, I was all over the place trying to keep up. It was a disaster.