Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

@hawkeye10,

Quote:

I was a EE at Michigan State so I know as well as you do that the rules for entrance into the School of Engineering are somewhat different than for the other schools. This will never change.

Hawkeye as far as I know we had been talking about screening out students at the high school level from taking advance classes in the very areas that any one going into an engineering program need.

Without a sold background in both science and mathematic at the high school level I question both that I would had been able to enter a school of engineering or been able to handle the work if I had enter without that background existing.

1 Reply

@BillRM,

Quote:

Without a sold background in both science and mathematic at the high school level I question both that I would had been able to enter a school of engineering or been able to handle the work if I had enter without that background existing

Unlike the other schools the engineering school cares mostly about one thing, your aptitude for math. I dont think that science matters much at all but for Physics, which is hugely important, but my physics class was basically the science of mathematics...IE Math.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Math is the language of all the hard science as we both know.

I remember in college I got interested in economic for some reason or other and ended up in a 600 level course on the theory of creating mathematic models of economic systems where the ability to deal with second/third order difference equation was just the starting point .

There was zero repeat zero economic majors taking this course as the university did not require of them to take the needed math courses at the time at the undergraduate level.

All the students was either math majors or with engineering backgrounds.

1 Reply

@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Some kids are incredibly smart but their school records don't reflect it. Maybe they're the ones that are really bored by school.

that was the group I was in. We were transferred to a different school, into a class for chronic under-achievers. They called it gifted but we knew the truth. We were bored. We needed teachers who could challenge us, and who could hold up under the stress of the push-back we gave them.

When they cancelled the program and threw us back into a mainstreamed class (at grade 7), there was a bit of a disaster. Suicide, drugs etc etc. Some of us coped better than others, but it was bad. After a taste of challenge, the boredom proved too dangerous for some of the kids.

For those of us who made it to high school, it was better again. Honours classes. They helped. For some of us. For some it still wasn't enough challenge.

"Special" kids in many different categories need different types of support, help and encouragement from their educators. That includes bored (sometimes literally to death) brainiacs.

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@engineer,

engineer wrote:

The approach I would favor is to open honors/AP classes up to all students with voluntary sign-ups.

I believe this, or something very like it has been proposed already. It makes the most sense to me, given that the process of selecting honor students may very likely just confirm biases already in operation. I believe what was described was offering honors classes to all, and only giving honors credit to those who performed to the (arbitrary) level, while everyone else would still get course credit, so long as they passed.

1 Reply

@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Some kids who were high school honors students don't do well in college simply because there isn't someone always patting them on the head telling them how wonderful they are.

that's quite a comment

certainly not reflective of education as I experienced it, or as I see for most of the smart kids I know today. Not a lot of people out there telling bright students how wonderful they are. There were, and continue to be, lots of people making fun of bright students.

Intelligent students face their own challenges. Regrettably, it's not politically correct to mention them. Never has been.

4 Replies

@ehBeth,

And that's why I said "some kids" and included it in a list of other types of "some kids".

Most students make fun of any student that is not a lot like themselves.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

Quote:

Not a lot of people out there telling bright students how wonderful they are. There were, and continue to be, lots of people making fun of bright students.

or at least are socially cold to students who are not willing to hide the fact that they have a well functioning brain. Looking at the school cuture reaction towards the academically gifted is very useful in the discovery of why schools today by and large do not work very well. The incentives are all wrong, and getting rid of honors classes is not going to fix the problem, but it will probably make it worse. At least in AP and honors classes my kids can be with other kids who will not constantly give them the cold shoulder because they are smart, know it, and act like it.

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

And that's why I said "some kids" and included it in a list of other types of "some kids".

Most students make fun of any student that is not a lot like themselves.

That 's not quite my memory of it, boomer.

As I remember, most students just kept quiet and trudged thru the day until the end,
altho thay absolutely LOVED IT when someone caught a teacher in a mistake.
THAT caused a flurry of excitement in them. Thay were grateful for it,
and said so after the class was over; their egos were vindicated.

Thay were of good cheer and congratulatory, as I remember,
in the face of spectacularly good academic performance.

Thay make up admiring nicknames and smile a lot.

David

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@BillRM,

Quote:

I remember in college I got interested in economic for some reason or other and ended up in a 600 level course on the theory of creating mathematic models of economic systems where the ability to deal with second/third order difference equation was just the starting point .

There was zero repeat zero economic majors taking this course as the university did not require of them to take the needed math courses at the time at the undergraduate level.

Something that might interest you, BillRM:

Graduate-level Economics programs do favour Math majors ahead of those people who majored in Economics as undergrads. (Or so my academic advisors in both departments have told me.)

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I believe this, or something very like it has been proposed already. It makes the most sense to me, given that the process of selecting honor students may very likely just confirm biases already in operation. I believe what was described was offering honors classes to all, and only giving honors credit to those who performed to the (arbitrary) level, while everyone else would still get course credit, so long as they passed.

I thought the original proposal was that all classes would be taught at the honors level and only those students performing well would get honors credit. I disagree with that approach because some students are not adequately prepared (for whatever reason) to be taught at the honors level. In a class where student preparation varies widely, I don't see how you avoid either moving slowly enough to allow the low end to succeed while boring the high end or moving too fast for those at the low end to catch up.

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Well, my original thoguht was that the standards by which students are chosen for honors classes need to be reviewed. Obviously, not absolutely everyone is right for an honors class--but there are very likely many students who don't automatically qualify who would still be capable of doing the work. I don't claim to have all the answers, but i do think that standardized testing is a failure at finding students who learn well, even if they don't possess all the white, middle class aracana. I also think tracking entails a self-fulfilling prophecy.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Quote:

I also think tracking entails a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If it works it does, as we get those picked for college ready and motivated for college, and those not ready and motivated for some function in society that does not required a college degree.

I dont think that America formally tracks at all anymore, as we have had a few waves of school reform since it was last widely used with all of these reform movements hostile to tracking. But it is used in much of the rest of the world, successfully. Keep in mind too that the knock on tracking in America was not that it does not work, it was that it is morally wrong to fence out possibilities till the very last second, no matter what inefficiencies and waste of resources this unwillingness to limit choices causes the collective.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Hawkeye a society that allow one person such as Edison to achieved what he did is worth all the inefficiencies you are claiming in the whole society by not locking people futures down at an early age for a few hundred years.

Try to name one of your more efficiencies societies that had an Edison or a Ford in it and neither men would had not been lock firmly into a dead end future by your ideal societies.

Hell I worked for a company created by a self taught engineer that at his death was worth over a billion dollars.

Locking people future down base of some tests is a very costly thing to do.

2 Replies

@Cycloptichorn,

I agree, I had no formal education before taking my first honors class, and it was nothing intellectually rigorous (my English teacher just sent me to the library after roll call because I'd already read the reading list over the summer), it was just more of a workload and well suited for people who were interested in learning.

Maybe I had an atypical experience but it didn't seem rigorous in any way except expecting more effort. Anyone who could read could have done the honors English class if they liked to read instead of opting for things like cliff notes. So the kids who put in effort got good grades, most of them were not that bright, just studious.

Any kid can be studious, they just have to want to. And around the world I see poorer kids than American minorities learn a lot more than they do with a mere fraction of the funding that American minorities have access to. In Latin America parents camp outside of schools in lines reminiscent of things like iPhone releases and concerts in America when it is time to enroll. They fight for their spots and their much greater poverty and social disadvantage doesn't stop them from becoming better educated than the American minorities who just don't try as hard as they do.

In my brief experience in American school I wished they would have not made it mandatory to attend, because the majority of the students there were simply not there to learn anything and no amount of throwing money at their education is going to change the parenting that permitted it. It was like trying to study amidst a bunch of juvenile inmates.

Even the worst schools in America are well above international averages in funding, but buying more expensive water isn't the way to make the horse drink. American students don't lack opportunity, they lack motivation. They are overwhelmingly lazy with almost no eagerness to learn compared to the rest of the world in my experience.

1 Reply

@BillRM,

Quote:

Locking people future down base of some tests is a very costly thing to do

tracking never locked anyone anywhere, what it does is make it so that extensive work and desire is needed to get out of the track you are currently in. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I am not willing to accept without proof or argument the assertion that tracking is bad for ANY individual, so he is put into a track based upon merit, and needing to prove yourself to get into another track can be good for that individual. There is no moral obligation on the collective to make easy the redirecting of life, nor to provide extensive options for the individual all though life. Doors should close to us as we collect birthdays, and they do, and this tendency we have to hold open doors to those who long ago proved themselves to be unworthy of that door is in no ones best interest. The collectives duty is to make standards fair and known, the individual then measures himself/herself against those standards. The choices we have in life should depend upon how we measure up....upon demonstrations of merit....

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

American students don't lack opportunity, they lack motivation. They are overwhelmingly lazy with almost no eagerness to learn compared to the rest of the world in my experience.

Exactly, and they are coddled with a school culture that refuses to make demands upon them, refuses to work to separate the wheat from the chafe. Education is fundamentally broken in America because the mission of the schools to educate has been watered down by all of the other duties schools have been given, worst of the bunch is to make sure kids feel good about themselves always. It has gotten so bad that school staffs no longer remember the schools were once supposed to pass on the academic arts, these people know longer remember what their primary job is, now that education has been confused with the project of attempting to manufacture the ideal human.

We have tried for 40 years to fix American education, but until and unless we are willing to talk about the real problem, the culture with-in the schools, we will never fix it. We keep talking about the methods and techniques needing tweaking,so we keep fiddling, as America burns.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

So you are claiming that tests in early childhood can uncover the merit of a person for his or her lifetime?

Hell we might had lost Einstein as if I remember correctly in his early schooling he did not set the world on fire. Place him in a low track..........

In any case one lost of an Edison or an Einstein and you had done far more harm then any good by not wasting resources by tracking.

Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

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