Reply to Universal AP English & History at Wilson next year for 11th grade

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Universal AP English & History at Wilson next year for 11th grade"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am an infrequent poster because I find these forums so toxic but I want to follow up on an earlier poster...for those who seem convinced (without evidence from what I can tell) that this is going to destroy the education of your "advanced" children, what is the solution?  Status quo? If so, do you recognize the damage of a two-track system where kids are essentially segregated by race?  If you do realize that the status quo is problematic, what is the solution?  And if your solution is "fixing the elementary schools"...are you willing to sacrifice several cohorts of BIPOC children until whatever elementary school "fixes" work through the system? If you have a different solution, what is it?  Because I don't know what the solution is but I'm willing to see how this plays out (I'm the parent of an "advanced" child) in the hopes that we can start to chip away the systemic racism built over generations.[/quote]

Has Honors for All been effective at “chipping away” at the achievement gap?  This same cohort has had 2 years of this plan already.  Has Wilson reported any results of the experiment?

We have one tiny anecdote above of a boy saying he gets better grades with less work.  Any other data?[/quote]

This is my experience:

April - May 2019 - Principal Martin told then 8th grade Deal parents of Honors for All, that was then in 9th grade but supposed to expand to higher levels year after year  - at the question how kids who are behind can function she responded that in 9th grade classes would be 10-15 kids max and that the school would identify students in need of extra help and help them so by the end of the year they would have improved and by 10th grade could again take honor classes and AP classes

9th grade - classes were gigantic, my kid had a class with 37 kids, the smallest was 25. my kid is at grade level so I don't have direct experience but I doubt, given high big classes were, that kids could get a lot of personal attention

May 2020, end of 9th grade - after mostly white kids sign up for AP World History, the Principal, instead of reflecting on why the honor for all system had apparently failed to prepare minority kids to sign up for the AP class in 10th grade, cancel the class for all sophomores citing institutional racisms. the call with the principal and parents of affected kids was depressing. it did not seem that the school was willing to look at its own system (was honors for all working? if not, as it appeared, so what can we do to bring kids who are behind to the level of everybody else?) and there was no explanation on how canceling the AP class for sophomores who had already signed up was going to help the kids who were behind. and the decision had already been made. as a last note, the teacher who was also on the call insisted that the decision had been made unanimously by the social studies department, while my kid's history teacher told us expressly that she thought the decision was idiotic and that she did not agree with it at all.

and now the AP for all BS. to me this looks like DCPS deja-vu. DCPS scrambles with a high numbers of kids who do not perform at grade level so, teachers cheat on tests (years ago that happened at some elementary schools that showed significant improvements on test scores, only to find out later than kids' responses had been changed. so kids who were falling behind were not identified and were not helped, but the school, and DCPS, could boast about how school reform was working. the Ballou scandal, where the former chancellor held the 100% graduation 100% going to college BS as a crowning of her 10 years tenure, and then we found out that it was all a fraud and so many kids were not actually in a position to graduate including kids who had 4 or 5 months of absences from school.

so now because not that many minority kids take AP classes, with the stroke of a pen the school makes them all AP students. how are kids who are now below grade level in English (and there are a good number based on tests) going to do in a AP English class? we were already promised very small classes in 9th grade and extra help and personal support and that did not happened so the same BS will happen again, but the school will be able to claim to have closed the achievement gap in a few short years.

you ask what we should do? I am not an educator so I admit I dont have a perfect solution, but just stop the lying and BS would be a great start. and after 2 years of honors for all, see how it is working, or not working and make adjustments, not just forging ahead with even more BS and dismissing people who complain as racists concerned about their snowflakes. I studied abroad in a country with no tracking and with the entire class taking the same classes year after year in MS and HS and we all did well, so I am certainly not a die hard advocate of segregating kids, quite the opposite. but at the same time there were no kids below grade level in my system. if kids were not a grade level they would have to repeat the entire year. also, in elementary school we did not do a lot of fancy research on DNA but we had a very solid preparation on the basics, math and reading and writing, more in depth work was left for HS.

finally, I agree with the poster above about the level of the honor classes.  a pig with lipstick is still a pig and you can call a class "fantastically advanced math" but if the content is basic this is still a casi class, I can't believe people are really fooled by names. my kid is awful at STEM just hanging on until the day she will take her last math test in her life in school to even forgot math exist.  at Deal she was in the basic classes (fancy name there too, like accelerated math or something but it was the basic class)  and did ok with it with work and our help. at Wilson she breezed through Algebra last year with A all year.  my experience with the Wilson teachers has been that they are great and dedicated and go the extra mile to help students, especially students who struggle (a math teacher last year instituted a weekly call on Sunday for parents with DL just to talk to the parents and make sure kids were on track) so certainly that was part of her success, but I saw what she was doing and the class was just a regular class at best ( same for Geometry and Chemistry), whoever thinks that these are some higher level classes above regular classes is just deluded

a good start would be to look at the situation with honesty, see what is working and not cover up what is not working and cut the BS[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics