Reply to Alg 1 vs Honors Alg

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]which school?[/b]

Honestly, the "honors" designation is not really honors. It's a way to inflate grades for lower performers, and to also not make those kids feel bad.

FWIW, I had kids in "honors" Alg.[/quote]

Why would the school matter?  Isn't it the same curriculum taught throughout the county?[/quote]

Ostensibly, yes. In practice, no. Long term subbed at multiple middle schools; although the curriculum was the same at all the schools, the level and depth covered was significantly different. At the lower performing schools - especially ones where "everyone was honors", any material not explicitly tested on a county progress check was not covered. In contrast all the materials in the curriculum would be covered at the higher performing school. So much so that at some schools the "advanced" IM class (combined math 7/8) at a lower performing school was not even the equivalent of a Math 7 at a higher performing school. That is the 2 or 3 extra subjects that were taught from IM were added at the cost of 5 or 6 regular level subjects.

For instance, I taught at one middle school one year, and then at the high school it fed into the next year. I and another teacher taught all the middle schoolers this required subject. And two middle schools fed into the high school. So since I had taught a quarter of all the high school 9th graders the previous year as middle school 8th graders, one would think that on average, about 1/4th of my students in high school would be students I knew already.
Nope; only 4 students out of about 150 (and I only had 2 of them) from the lower performing school were placed in the honors sections at the high school that I was teaching. And of those 4 (yeah, I tracked them...) only two stuck with the honors track. The students from the lower performing middle school simply weren't prepared for the higher and more rigorous  pace of "honors" at their high school. And of course the students had little clue; for them things were much the same, they were still in classes with their peers from middle school. It would have taken a student (or their parent) quite a bit of outside-the-box thinking to realize the students from the two feeder middle schools were not very mixed.

So, although the same curriciulum is used, how deeply and thoroughly it is attended to is very school dependent.

And for what it''s worth, I didn't think the difference was in the quality of the students, or the quality of the teachers. It - IMHO - directly related to the competency (or lack there of) of the administrative team. But I'm sure some admins lurking around will take great umbrage at my suggestion that "It's not the student, it's not the teacher, it's the admin" that makes the biggest controllable-by-the-county difference in outcomes.[/quote]

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