I went all the way through that Only for MY Kid article and while I think there are a few interesting points in it, I thought in general, it was a poorly written rant disguished as a scholarly report.
First, one thing that I thought was interesting and of value:
Quote:Honors classes are dominated by whites, regular classes by blacks."[6] In response, a liberal New Republic columnist readily agreed that the honors program in his own daughter's school in Montgomery County, Maryland, amounted to "a school within a school" for the white and Asian students -- and then announced that if this program were eliminated, he would pull his daughter out of that school "in a nanosecond."[
I've seen this directly at one of the local high schools and thought it was unusual, but in this context it makes perfect sense. The main down-town high school here was heavily impacted by desegregation in the 70's. They lost many students to a private high school started specifically to resist integration. In the 90's they responded by creating the
Lyceum program, essentially a school within a school where they can group all the best students who then receive special integrated instruction of just the type the author would approve of for everyone. I think this program pretty much fits the bill of what the author is trying in terms of diverting resources to the best students to prevent white flight from the school. None of the other area high schools do this.
On the down side, this article ranges all over they place, conflating all the battlelines in education together even if they are not related to the hypothesis proposed, that parents are actively promoting the taking of resources from the have nots for the benefits of the haves.
Quote:The controversies in which these parents involve themselves fall into three clusters, the first of which concerns the type of instruction that is offered. ...
Second, there is the question of placement, or which students get what. This category includes debates over such issues as tracking, ability grouping, gifted-and-talented programs, and honors courses...
Finally, there are the practices that take place after the instruction, in which the emphasis is on selecting and sorting students so only a few are recognized: awards, letter grades, weighted grades (which give an additional advantage to those in the selective courses), honor rolls, and class rank...
It is the difference between a bumper sticker that says, "My Child Is an Honor Student at . . ." (with the understood postscript: "And Yours Isn't") ...
These are radically different issues and many of them have no impact on how resources are allocated. The author sites a group in Palo Alto, California, "where a similarly elite constituency demands a return to a "skill and drill" math curriculum and fiercely opposes the more conceptual learning outlined in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards." I support "skill and drill" for all levels of math students because it produces results. If you want someone to learn to read, you encourage them to read all the time, have their parents read to them and assign reading every night. If you want someone to master the violin, you expect them to devote time to practice every day, but somehow if you want someone to learn math, all you need is to understand the concept. I hate seeing students struggle through Algebra because they stumble over the basic multiplication and division. On the third point, I find the argument lacking as well. We had a
thread on honor roles before so I won't rehash it, but this is essentially the opposite of the pony argument from a few posts ago: if you post your student's good performance on the wall, I want mine to get a pony! Who looks at a bumper sticker saying my child is an honor student and thinks "you're dissing my child because he's not" (other than the author of this article)? We report prep sports scores and there you have clear winners and losers, but heaven forbid we praise a student that excels acedemically. Just to be clear on my position on this particular issue, I do not support nor have I ever seen letter grades in elementary school, but I think they are fine for high schools. Even if you feel otherwise, I can't see how having letter grades changes the allocation of resources outside of the remaining point.
That leaves point two which is the only one pertinent to the argument of the article:
Quote:... there is the question of placement, or which students get what. This category includes debates over such issues as tracking, ability grouping, gifted-and-talented programs, and honors courses...
I need to get some work done, so I will return to this in another post. (Plus it takes a while to get all my quotes in order and this post is already too long.)
