Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

i thought that's what pot was for

I used both.

Cycloptichorn

Excuse me?

These things directly effect how a school is funded.

Do you think children should be penalized for the decisions their parent's have made or the problems they have encountered?

How is a high school English honors class preparing anyone "to help.... everyone else"?

whether I do or not is irrelevant, it is going to happen and no matter what correctives we attempt we will never be able to negate all the harm done by poor parenting or coming from comming to age in the lower classes...and we can do nothing about bad genetics.

smart people who are given as much education as they can handle as adults become the best of the best of the technical specialists who keep this technical society humming...or at least that is the plan, we dont hum too well these days, in large part because the education system is broken.

That was my point exactly - it would be unfair to disadvantage able honours students from attending certain universities by dismantling the honors classes - instead UP the levels at the high schools so more could compete.

That kind of drivel is typical of what he tries to peddle whenever a subject such as this comes up. Genetics? Please . . . for example, how anyone can look at and listen to that horse-faced clown the Prince of Wales and believe that he is rich and famous for any other reason than purely arbitrary privilege is a mystery to me. The family that now calls itself Windsor has displayed nothing so much as an obstinate, pig-headed stupidity for three hundred years.

Technical specialist will keep the country running? Really?

Here's a list of billionaire high school and college dropouts: http://www.twincommas.com/billionaire-college-dropouts

The list includes some of the major innovators who "keep things humming".

you are Begining to sound like firefly...we are a country of 250+ million and so you pull out a few individual cases that go the way you want them to go and then want to claim that you know what is happening?? No, you need to look at the whole picture to see what the truth is. You would for instance need to look at a pool of ceo's or scientist and then figure out what their childhood class was. I am claiming that they would skew towards the upper classes, which no one has seriously denied in my presence, though some do claim that it is all do to economic advantage, an assertion that I find highly suspect.

Look, we like our feel goodism in this country, we like to pretend that every poor kid with lousy parents has just as much a shot at success (what ever you happen to call success) as does the 11 year old girl who lives in the gated community who's parents are successful professionals.....it is fantasy, which we create because we dont want to deal with the reality. No matter how smart the 11 year old poor girl is, and even though she might make it, the truth of the matter is that she already has two strikes against her.

Even when America was a wealthy country we did not have enough money to throw at this situation to change it, and now we are bankrupt we dont have any money to throw at this project of trying to turn fantasy into reality.

Also, a good number of those successful dropouts will I think say when asked that they dropped out not because they could not do the work, or could not afford to continue, but rather because these schools were a waste of their time. The correlation does not show what you think that it does.

When I was a general substitute teacher in a suburban Boston school system, a parent pinned me to the wall while she told me her theories on education.

She saw tracking as wasting money. Nothing could persuade her that tracking did not waste money.

She felt that with four tracks -- college prep 2 at the bottom, through college prep 1 to either honors or advanced, and finally to advanced placement in the senior year (yes, that make five. She was ill-informed.) -- the cost of education was higher than it would be if every child used the same book.

When I asked her whether she would increase the number of students in each class, she said no. I explained to her that it didn't matter whether there were multiple tracks or not in terms of the budget: the same number of students required the same number of teachers and the same amount of books. She didn't get it.


Fast forward several years to this fall when NPR ran a story on urban kids (sorry, but I neither remember the month the story aired nor the school system under discussion) who were put into Shakespeare rather than a typical College Prep 2 class. They loved Shakespeare and were happy to have a challenging curriculum.

Now, fast forward again to a few hours ago. One of my students at the community college where I teach said that too much time is wasted in high school. He spoke of how it takes months to read a novel in high school. Why is that? Because kids won't read and they goof off and drag the class . . . and the teacher with it . . . into the mud.

I taught Romeo and Juliet to SPED kids. None of them actually had a low IQ. It took forever. I wanted it over and done with in two weeks, as it should have been. It's a play, for gawd's sake, not War and Peace.

That is part of the reason why I agree with the poster who said that the new class would not be on the level of the old honors class.

I think women proved that when you allow a group equal access to education that they will succeed.

I think many people find that very threatening when the idea comes to extending that access to minorities.

If all schools were funded equally then that "11 year old black girl with bad parents" would at least have the opportunity to enter the honors class.

And white people wouldn't think they had to flee their neighborhoods because their TAG and honors programs were being cut and thereby lower the property values in the neighborhood and thereby reduce the funding for the neighborhood school and thereby creating a situation where an "11 year old black girl with bad parents" doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting into an honors class.

As it is now we just continue this idiotic cycle that allows some people to think that a certain "class" is inferior.

But they aren't talking about putting the SpEd kids in the class.

Everyone who passed the standardized test to be reading and writing at grade level could take the class.

Kids who did really well in the class would earn honors credit. Others would earn class credit or they'd fail.

If you really want to prepare kids for freshman level of college put them in a class with 300 kids and a TA. Sink or swim.

It was just my example because I taught SPED that year. These were kids who judged to be absolutely without intellectual cause for being in SPED.

the best of the best are way too bright to benefit from assembly line/warehouse education. That is what you give the slow kids. The bright need to have a teacher who is smarter than them, and a chance to test themselves against this smart teacher, who ideally is better educated then they are.

Then why are so many freshman level college classes taught exactly like this?

Isn't it just "the best of the best" who are able to get into college? From the way people act you'd think that a kid had to have a perfect score on their SAT (which, by the way, more and more colleges are ignoring) to get into Poduck U.

lack of funds. And becuase this now is a class that is taught down at the old high school level, it is only for the not bright kids, ie, the ones who did not get at least a 3 on AP english. It is a remedial class, grudgingly provided by the university pissed off that they need to do the work that should have been done in high school, not worth university money or effort.

Untrue.

Nearly all the basic, required courses are taught like that at college.

Yes indeed, and it's been that way for at least forty years and more--it was that way when i went to university more than 40 years ago. It was true in the sciences and in the humanities. The only small classes i was in were those for my majors and my minor--classes which required that you major or minor in the subject in order to able to enrol.

Honor classes are the bastions of the white, Protestant ascendancy?

Whatever the reasons may be for disproportionate racial or class representation in honor classes, elimnating the program will not address them.

What is actually gained by moving students previously designated as "honor" grade to "average" grade classes?

If the minority students are in some way being unjustly discriminated against when it comes to being placed in honor programs, and all that actually separates them from their "honor" grade classmates is exposure to Ludacris rather than Beethoven, then there is no reason to believe they will benefit from the mere proximity of students that the evils of standardized testing have designated as special.

Whereas, if "honor" classes truly are beneficial to students that attend them, elimnating them will deprive this benefit to actual children who, unless one believes they have dishonestly plotted to steal their place in the class from a minority student, are at no fault in terms of whatever discrimination may or may not be in effect.

Students who have never been encouraged to read Robinson Crusoe, and Huckleberry Finn, or who have no knowledge of Plato or Picasso may have the same degree of native intelligence as the scions of the white, Protestant ascendancy, but they have a clear gap in their education that will not be filled by the elimination of honor classes.

Someone's skewed sense of justice may be satisfied, but no good is done for any of the children involved.

Straw man . . . i didn't say that honors classes are the bastions of the white, Protestant ascendancy. I haven't called for their elimination, either. So, as usual, you post drivel which addresses nothing which i have written, but only your fantasies of indignation.