Reply to S/O High SES students will perform well no matter their peer group

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Reply to "S/O High SES students will perform well no matter their peer group"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think DCPS major strategy to close the achievement gap is to cap the growth of the top kids. They want to limit any options that will help advanced kids as that will just increase the gap between top and bottom. Two ways to close a gap - push down the top or raise up the bottom. They are not competent enough to do much with the kids who really need intervention so they want to limit the potential of the highest achieving kids.[/quote]

School systems' access to federal funding is based largely on test scores, so the key metric that DCPS policymakers care about is PARCC scores.  That's what teachers, schools, and ultimately the whole system are judged by.  So no, they have no interest in "limiting options that will help advanced kids" as a strategy to somehow narrow the achievement gap.  Smart kids will get a 5 on PARCC tests, and that's what DCPS wants.  It's not like those kids might be getting a 10 on PARCC and DCPS somehow whats to prevent that.  The test only goes to 5.

These statements, which are repeated often on DCUM, are a pathetic paranoid fantasy that's totally unreflective of the incentive structure driving the decisions of DCPS policymakers -- an incentive structure that's widely published and easy to understand.  The fact that supposedly educated grown adults would rather sit around dreaming up ways to cast themselves as somehow victims is really sad.

The move away from tracking (e.g. "honors for all" at Wilson) is driven by a totally transparent, simple, easily understood history that's also been explained many times.  Honors class access at Wilson used to be based on recommendations from the middle school.   NW middle schools recommended almost all of their students for honors classes whereas other middle schools were recommending literally none of their kids, regardless of the individual kids' ability level.  [b]This was an inequitable way of tracking students that was really not based on ability[/b].

Rather than experience the nightmare of type-A NW parent pushback ("what do you mean Johnnie's not in honors classes?") and administrative PITA that placement testing would have caused, the school decided to try to teach the richer, more rigorous curriculum of honors courses to all students.  Basically they decided to make classes harder for everybody.  They also tried to put more kids in AP classes.

I totally understand why they did this.  I think it was a huge mistake that does a dis-service to kids at all levels, but I totally understand why they did it -- after all, their reasoning has been explained very clearly many times.  For those who don't choose to indulge in paranoid victimhood, it's pretty straightforward.
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It sounds like you drank some of the kool aid served by Wilson HS's principal. You are exactly right about the justification given by the principal but you failed to recognize it as a lame pretext for what we all knew the principal really wanted to do all along - eliminate as much tracking as possible at Wilson.

The notion that Wilson HS did not have and could not acquire sufficient information about incoming freshman to identify those ready for honors work is simply a joke. Virtually all of the incoming freshman are from Deal and Hardy, and Wilson has access to both their historical PARCC scores and middle school grades. The principal's claim-which is unverifiable-was that the middle school recommendations regarding which kids were ready for honors-level coursework were unreliable because one school recommended almost everyone (Deal) and the other recommend almost no one (Hardy). So, in a great example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, instead of going back to the middle schools for additional information or looking at historical achievement scores to make the best possible determination, the principal simply said let's put everyone in the same class and call it "honors". Thus was born "Honors for All".

Given the stated justification, you might think the story ends there. But no. The very next year the principal announced that "Honors for All" would be extended to 10th grade as well. This extension put the lie to her pretext for instituting "Honors for All" in the first place because Wilson has boatloads of info on 10th graders who have been at the school for a full year. To those of us paying attention, this was not a surprise. She recently announced that "Honors for All" would be further extended to "Physics for All" - I am not joking.

So while I really do appreciate that you, like me, believe this is a huge mistake, I don't agree that Wilson's principal gave a "totally transparent, simple, easily understood" justification in the first place. It was lame and disingenuous, and I have lost all trust in her words and leadership.
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Sigh.  “What we all knew all along.”  Actually, paranoid fantasists on dcum are the only people who believe that they know about this secret conspiracy.  All the Wilson parents I know in real life take the principal at her word because we u aren’t insane. [/quote]

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