Wilson honors for all - how has it worked?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Biologist here.

It’s widely agreed in the hard sciences that education and nutrition “research” is crap.

As with PP economist, I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about best practices, just let’s not put blind faith in education “research” and demand “data” to make a decision.

I’d be willing to read the tiered study you’re talking about - want to link it? (Is it truly _experimental_ as you say?)

Chicago study and others are linked in an earlier post.

Found the post. The Chicago study is observational. The one experimental study I saw was done in Kenya. It is unclear if that’s very generalizable to DC area. The Figlio study appears to be high-quality.

That said, the Brookings report is a fair minded and cautious review of the available evidence, in which many different studies confirm what is common sense to any teacher or parent: tracking helps the most advanced and least advanced kids.

The real misfiring of research on the tracking issue came 3-4 decades ago when the education establishment decided, based on “research”, that tracking should be eliminated. My aunt was a public school teacher at the time. She made a stink then, and she was right. It just took a few decades for the educational establishment to catch up to what all good teachers knew.

Moral: seek out good teachers and parents and listen to them; consider research but do not follow education research blindly.

And the relevant point for the thread topic: Wilson’s “Honors for No One” approach is a terrible idea, and is likely to hurt low-achievement students while driving away high-achievement students, and corroding the quality of the school and its family support.

[Anonymous]

Studies may not be accurate. Let’s accept that as a given for the moment. If we look at statistics (leaving aside the lies and damned lies), we can see that the percentages of children in AP classes in this area, including the suburbs, are overwhelmingly white. Now, if we look at the methodology for funneling students into AP courses, we see that teacher recommendations lead to test-taking, and interestingly, those recommendations are, overwhelmingly, for white students. Black students are disproportionately not being given the chance to take the tests that allow admittance to AP classes. And, if we compare IQ levels across classes, we find that there are students with higher IQs scattered throughout lower-level classes, and students with lower IQs scattered throughout AP classes. Discuss.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I’m the PP this post is replying to. (The biologist)

YES. Exactly. It’s a limitation of the fields, not that the people are idiots.

The problem is when people say “But your opinion is invalid because you’re ignoring the RESEARCH. You have to have DATA.” People who say that implicitly equate physicists measuring the Planck constant to 18 decimal places, to an education study that shows with p<0.05 that “homogeneous mixing is good”. These are two TOTALLY different kinds of research. One probably shouldn’t even use the same word.

I feel similarly about the STAR school report cards. These are approximate measures at best, and worse the STAR criteria are targets for manipulation. The STAR ratings are guidelines only, due to the inherent uncertainty of the approach. When parents tell me “well that school is better because it has 5 instead of 4 stars!!!” I just roll my eyes. STAR ratings are useful ahorthand to get a view over dozens of schools. But an experienced parent or teacher visiting two schools is far better than the STAR data.

I think I found the paper that you were mocking about heterogeneous classrooms (Burris et al in 2006 https://cxwork.gseis.ucla.edu/pli/14/mp/js/fieldwork-portfolio/docs/burris-research-article-on-tracking), and I'm not really getting the basis for your disdain. Nowhere does the paper I found cite a p value to assert that a particular policy is "good" (which kind of is a nonsense formulation, given that p-value is the probability under the null hypothesis of getting the observed result, right? So nothing to do with something being "good" or "bad").

I'm not an academic, but the accelerated, heterogeneous classroom paper seems to me straightforward observation of the results of de-tracking and putting all kids in accelerated classes on a couple of specific measures in one school district in New York. And, the results observed were that minority and low SES groups did better on a couple of measures than those groups did previously:

"Some findings are of note regarding minority and low-SES students. For example, after universal acceleration in heterogeneously grouped classes, the percentage of minority students who met the mathematics commencement requirement (passing the Sequential Mathematics I regents examination) before they entered high school tripled, from 23% to 75%. Also, higher percentages of African American, Latino, and low-SES students passed the exam in eighth-grade detracked classes than in tracked eighth- and ninth-grade classes before universal acceleration. Moreover, two thirds of African American, Latino, and low-SES students in the post-universal-acceleration cohorts successfully completed Sequential Mathematics III, the first advanced mathematics course identified in the literature as being associated with success in college (Adelman, 1999)."

Do you doubt the authors' ability to tabulate these kind of straightforward results? Do you doubt their ethics? Do you think they fudged the data? Please help me understand the basis of your disdain of this data, and by extension the educational establishment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Found the post. The Chicago study is observational. The one experimental study I saw was done in Kenya. It is unclear if that’s very generalizable to DC area. The Figlio study appears to be high-quality.

That said, the Brookings report is a fair minded and cautious review of the available evidence, in which many different studies confirm what is common sense to any teacher or parent: tracking helps the most advanced and least advanced kids.

The real misfiring of research on the tracking issue came 3-4 decades ago when the education establishment decided, based on “research”, that tracking should be eliminated. My aunt was a public school teacher at the time. She made a stink then, and she was right. It just took a few decades for the educational establishment to catch up to what all good teachers knew.

Moral: seek out good teachers and parents and listen to them; consider research but do not follow education research blindly.

And the relevant point for the thread topic: Wilson’s “Honors for No One” approach is a terrible idea, and is likely to hurt low-achievement students while driving away high-achievement students, and corroding the quality of the school and its family support.

Here's a 2006 paper documenting improvements in lower-SES and minority outcomes on a couple of measures when classes were de-tracked and all students were put into accelerated math classes in one school district in New York (https://cxwork.gseis.ucla.edu/pli/14/mp/js/fieldwo...s-research-article-on-tracking). These results seems clearly at variance with the larger, longer term Chicago observational study. The question that's interesting to me is: why? What's different? And, which results are more likely to be generalizable to DC? I suspect that Chicago is a lot more like DC and that the longer term, larger Chicago study is more representative of what will happen here, but I wonder specifically why the results were different and whether those outcomes persisted in New York.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Studies may not be accurate. Let’s accept that as a given for the moment. If we look at statistics (leaving aside the lies and damned lies), we can see that the percentages of children in AP classes in this area, including the suburbs, are overwhelmingly white. Now, if we look at the methodology for funneling students into AP courses, we see that teacher recommendations lead to test-taking, and interestingly, those recommendations are, overwhelmingly, for white students. Black students are disproportionately not being given the chance to take the tests that allow admittance to AP classes. And, if we compare IQ levels across classes, we find that there are students with higher IQs scattered throughout lower-level classes, and students with lower IQs scattered throughout AP classes. Discuss.

These have played a big role at Wilson, although parents could push for their kids to be in honors or AP classes. I think this is important. Previous posters talked about tracking based on test scores, but AFAIK, at Wilson it really was based on teacher recommendations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Found the post. The Chicago study is observational. The one experimental study I saw was done in Kenya. It is unclear if that’s very generalizable to DC area. The Figlio study appears to be high-quality.

That said, the Brookings report is a fair minded and cautious review of the available evidence, in which many different studies confirm what is common sense to any teacher or parent: tracking helps the most advanced and least advanced kids.

The real misfiring of research on the tracking issue came 3-4 decades ago when the education establishment decided, based on “research”, that tracking should be eliminated. My aunt was a public school teacher at the time. She made a stink then, and she was right. It just took a few decades for the educational establishment to catch up to what all good teachers knew.

Moral: seek out good teachers and parents and listen to them; consider research but do not follow education research blindly.

And the relevant point for the thread topic: Wilson’s “Honors for No One” approach is a terrible idea, and is likely to hurt low-achievement students while driving away high-achievement students, and corroding the quality of the school and its family support.

Here's a 2006 paper documenting improvements in lower-SES and minority outcomes on a couple of measures when classes were de-tracked and all students were put into accelerated math classes in one school district in New York (https://cxwork.gseis.ucla.edu/pli/14/mp/js/fieldwo...s-research-article-on-tracking). These results seems clearly at variance with the larger, longer term Chicago observational study. The question that's interesting to me is: why? What's different? And, which results are more likely to be generalizable to DC? I suspect that Chicago is a lot more like DC and that the longer term, larger Chicago study is more representative of what will happen here, but I wonder specifically why the results were different and whether those outcomes persisted in New York.

There was an OP above that said the problem with educational research is the field- it’s just difficult-to-impossible to study.
Outcome measures take years to collect, effects are small, and there are a million endogenous factors that are impossible to completely control.
That’s the problem with these two studies.

Really, don’t tie yourself in knots trying to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes there is no clear answer from a study.

[Anonymous]

^
But that 2006 study EXACTLY illustrates the problem— a small observational study shows de-tracking is good and it’s used as justification to change education policy. Facepalm.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Studies may not be accurate. Let’s accept that as a given for the moment. If we look at statistics (leaving aside the lies and damned lies), we can see that the percentages of children in AP classes in this area, including the suburbs, are overwhelmingly white. Now, if we look at the methodology for funneling students into AP courses, we see that teacher recommendations lead to test-taking, and interestingly, those recommendations are, overwhelmingly, for white students. Black students are disproportionately not being given the chance to take the tests that allow admittance to AP classes. And, if we compare IQ levels across classes, we find that there are students with higher IQs scattered throughout lower-level classes, and students with lower IQs scattered throughout AP classes. Discuss.

Point taken.

But if some deserving minority kids are missed by the tracking, is that a reason to eliminate the tracking for all kids? That sounds like a terrible, self-destructive overreaction.

I’d say: keep the honors programs and add additional methods to find and select talented minority kids (and just as critical, support them along their way in the program.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Studies may not be accurate. Let’s accept that as a given for the moment. If we look at statistics (leaving aside the lies and damned lies), we can see that the percentages of children in AP classes in this area, including the suburbs, are overwhelmingly white. Now, if we look at the methodology for funneling students into AP courses, we see that teacher recommendations lead to test-taking, and interestingly, those recommendations are, overwhelmingly, for white students. Black students are disproportionately not being given the chance to take the tests that allow admittance to AP classes. And, if we compare IQ levels across classes, we find that there are students with higher IQs scattered throughout lower-level classes, and students with lower IQs scattered throughout AP classes. Discuss.

Point taken.

But if some deserving minority kids are missed by the tracking, is that a reason to eliminate the tracking for all kids? That sounds like a terrible, self-destructive overreaction.

I’d say: keep the honors programs and add additional methods to find and select talented minority kids (and just as critical, support them along their way in the program.)

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Studies may not be accurate. Let’s accept that as a given for the moment. If we look at statistics (leaving aside the lies and damned lies), we can see that the percentages of children in AP classes in this area, including the suburbs, are overwhelmingly white. Now, if we look at the methodology for funneling students into AP courses, we see that teacher recommendations lead to test-taking, and interestingly, those recommendations are, overwhelmingly, for white students. Black students are disproportionately not being given the chance to take the tests that allow admittance to AP classes. And, if we compare IQ levels across classes, we find that there are students with higher IQs scattered throughout lower-level classes, and students with lower IQs scattered throughout AP classes. Discuss.

Point taken.

But if some deserving minority kids are missed by the tracking, is that a reason to eliminate the tracking for all kids? That sounds like a terrible, self-destructive overreaction.

I’d say: keep the honors programs and add additional methods to find and select talented minority kids (and just as critical, support them along their way in the program.)

PP here. Yes, I agree. My understanding of the Wilson parameters is that all kids have honors in ninth grade, and the ones who do well then continue in honors the following years. I could be wrong about this, but if true it is in fact a method of catching kids who can do well by giving them a chance.

[Anonymous]

Entry into AP classes at Wilson has nothing to do with teacher recommendations. Anyone is allowed to sign up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Entry into AP classes at Wilson has nothing to do with teacher recommendations. Anyone is allowed to sign up.

Yes, but teachers and counselors tell kids what they should sign up for. They are going through the process right now, and that’s exactly how it works.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^
But that 2006 study EXACTLY illustrates the problem— a small observational study shows de-tracking is good and it’s used as justification to change education policy. Facepalm.

Well, to be fair more like 30 years of studies starting in the mid-eighties. In several countries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Entry into AP classes at Wilson has nothing to do with teacher recommendations. Anyone is allowed to sign up.

No. Not true teachers make recommendations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Entry into AP classes at Wilson has nothing to do with teacher recommendations. Anyone is allowed to sign up.

That is true now because of Wilson’s honors for all. Which is what we are debating the merits of.