Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

I am talking about teachers teaching all students with the same enthusiasm, diligence,
care, and high expectations that Honors classes receive

Hi, David.

My older daughter is now in her second year
of teaching math classes at a high school in the city
where she currently resides. She's very smart and loves kids.
On two separate occasions I've helped her grade test papers.
I can tell you right now that many of these students DON'T EVEN TRY.

Once during a test day, one of the students spoke out and said,
"But I wasn't paying attention that day." My daughter's response was "Uh-huh."

The plaintiff you described lacked both a knowledge of probable consequence,
as well as a sense of responsibility.

The two most immediately obvious probable consequences would be that he won,
and was therefore stealing from the defendant;

and, that he would lose, and suffer adversely himself (at the very least, having the expense of a failed suit).

He also, apparently, lacked a sense of responsiblity, giving no thought to who might be hurt by his actions.

When i was in the army, i opened my foot locker in the barracks one day to get a clean pair of socks
(keeping clean, dry socks on your feet is important).

I then thought that i should wash my feet first, and, looking around, and seeing no one else there, i went into the latrine, and rinsed my feet off in the shower. Having dried them, i walked back into the bay where my bunk was, to catch this joker going through my foot locker. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing--his reply was: "Hey man, i didn't know it was yours." I resopnded: "You knew it wasn't yours! Who the hell raised you?" He got pissed and asked if was talking about his mama. I said yes. He backed down.

He also lacked a consideration of the probable consequences--in this case, either that i would be robbed, or that he would be caught, and might suffer adverse consequences. And, of course, he lacked a sense of responsibility.

However, i don't think that it is the job of schools to teach children a sense of responsibility, and i even doubt that they can reasonably be required to teach the consideration of consequences, beyond teaching children how to think logically. Teachers do well to give students the lessons of the curriculum. Responsibility and consequences are things they must learn in the home.

Lash wrote:

I am talking about teachers teaching all students with the same enthusiasm, diligence, care, and high expectations that Honors classes receive

Can it be the difference between teaching students with powerful minds, who reek of success, as distinct from others whose academic history shows them to be a bunch of losers ?

(race and income had nothing to do with it).

Students who come from poor families with few resources are working at a great disadvantage in comparison to those who come from affluent homes.

However, i cannot at all agree that income has nothing to do with success in school. Students who come from poor families with few resources are working at a great disadvantage in comparison to those who come from affluent homes

Oylok wrote:

(race and income had nothing to do with it)

However, i cannot at all agree that income has nothing to do with success in school. Students who come from poor families with few resources are working at a great disadvantage in comparison to those who come from affluent homes.

Like being able to hire tutors, for instance.

But if what you're saying is that I unconsciously enjoyed working with the richer ones because those were the ones who had had more prior success and thus picked up the material faster, you may be right. That may well have happened. Good teachers must overcome that partiality, and I certainly tried to give the stragglers as much support as I gave the high-achievers.

Tell me, Hawkeye, how do you know that the adults in these families tell their children? Do you go from house to house to demand that you be made privy to their lectures to their children?

In some of our cultures, the value of education comes from a Confucian heritage, which puts scholars at the top of the social hierarchy and reveres teachers. Confucius’ birthday is celebrated on September 28 in Taiwan with a national holiday called Teachers’ Day, with ceremonies, dances, and presents for teachers. Confucius is revered as the first teacher, one who advocated education for all—a radical concept in his time.

In many of our families, education is valued because our parents are educated themselves. Many Asian immigrants first come to America for graduate education and so hold advanced degrees; others would not have been allowed into America without their advanced degrees or medical training. Because of language difficulties, it was easier for those trained in math, science, computers, and medicine to succeed here.

Ah, I see the beginnings of the model minority myth…

In many other families, education is seen as a way out of the hard work and poverty whence spring the parents, or as a means of providing better lives for their children. We’ve all heard stories of parents sacrificing everything to send their children to the best schools. My dad was so impressed by a Japanese-American neighbor who worked in a nursery all his life and still drives a rusty old pick-up truck while his three daughters attended private schools and drove Mercedes Benzes.

But I never really thought about the lengths I would go to in the name of education until I had my own children.

All of a sudden all I could see were cartoon heroes who were average or underachieving students—Bart Simpson, Recess, even Arthur. I was horrified by conversations with Caucasian American parents who wanted to hold their children back a grade because their birthday was just before the cutoff (whereas I was trying to find a way to push my daughter a grade ahead because her birthday was just after the cutoff), who criticized other parents for teaching their kindergartners multiplication (whereas I was impressed and inspired), or who said things like, "They need to have a life" (they are children—learning new things is their life). I became concerned that my children might feel ashamed of being bright or that I would have to hide my ambition for them. I felt like I have to be on guard against American culture’s devaluing of education.

Not that I would want a totally Asian education either, which emphasizes rote memorization and conformity. I want them to learn art and music, leadership and creativity, to ask questions and to think outside of the box, but I want them to have a firm foundation in math and science, too. I want them to have the best of both approaches to education, but not so much in terms of content as attitude. I do not want them to be satisfied with passing, but to always strive for excellence.

When we were house-hunting, I researched all the schools first, public and private. I knew all the test scores, the ethnic breakdowns, the test scores by ethnic breakdown, stories and rumors about the teachers and the atmosphere. I finally decided on the school that had both the highest test scores and the highest concentration of Asian-American children—30 percent, as opposed to the city’s average 9 percent. On the one hand, I feel it is important for my kids to grow up surrounded by other Asian Americans so they do not feel like minorities (or freaks). But as an added benefit, I figured that since most Asian-American parents in my town are immigrants who first came here for graduate school, most of them are going to be pushing their kids hard, especially in math and science. Those are the friends I want my kids to have.

I was a little embarrassed about being so hard core, until I talked to other Asian-American parents and discovered that I was not alone. Many Asian Americans try to buy homes in this area, and if they cannot afford a house, then they move into an apartment. I do not know if I would go that far. But one friend of mine just moved out of a new 2000 square foot, 4 bedroom tract home, and into University of Michigan family housing just so that her children could go to a slightly better public school.

In California, Asian Americans are also concentrated by good school districts: Cupertino, Saratoga, Monterey Park are all at least 50 percent APA. Asian shopping malls sprout up in the surrounding area, after-school tutoring centers are de rigueur, and housing prices rise exponentially.

I start salivating at the thought of it and try to figure out how I could possibly afford to buy a house in those incredibly expensive areas. But then I hear stories about how some Caucasian parents are moving out of those school districts because they feel the Asian-American kids are pushing the curve up too high and their children cannot compete.

Moving away because a school is too good? That sounds almost as crazy, as alien to me as paying a child for a C on her report card.

There is some huge culture gap here that I am just not getting.

Even as I write I am aware of the many generalizations, the spoken and unspoken stereotypes, lurking beneath this surface. I am aware that in speaking of education as an "Asian family value," I risk appearing to imply that rigorous educational attainment could not also be an African-American, Hispanic-American, Greek-American, Native American, or Irish-American family value as well.

While this is not my intention, I also want to stake a claim for Asian-American education values as being a special if not unique legacy of our Asian heritages. Claiming this at a time of deep teacher shortages and poor public school performance in a country that can be rabidly anti-intellectual is worthy, perhaps necessary.

In the strict sense of maximizing our education, the "Model Minority" may be one stereotype that we—and Americans of any ethnicity—should not only accept, but might do well to embrace

the motivation level of the students can not help but to greatly effect the motivation level of the teachers. It makes a great deal of difference to how the teacher performs if her students come from Asian families where the parents have instructed the kids that failure in school is not an option as apposed to iner city black kids where the kids have been taught that the schools suck and they are being cheated out of a quality education.