Reply to Wilson honors for all - how has it worked?

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Reply to "Wilson honors for all - how has it worked?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I used to be an economics professor. I did my graduate and undergraduate work at two universities that are in the top ten in my field. When I began teaching at a local private university, I discovered, in talking with the students, that they hadn;t covered the same material in their intro econ courses that is generally covered in the same courses at the top ten schools. The local private university had left out more rigorous topics. The professors at the local private also tended to ask their students to do in class debate or presentations, rather than writing lengthy papers. So some colleges do pitch their courses to the median student.

They don;t have to, though. If this same thing is actually occurring at Wilson, parents should be able to provide numerous examples of topics left off the syllabus or assignments made less rigorous. Please do so. If it is happening, supporting evidence should be easy to find.

Without supporting evidence, the hostility to Honors for All just sounds like ranting.

This metastudy seems to suggest that, on average, previous posters noting that detracking doesn;t hurt top students, but helps student at the bottom.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21349011/

While this one suggests that within- class ability grouping benefits high achieving students, while between- class grouping does not.

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1121483[/quote]

This is obviously a long thread but numerous posts have provided detailed evidence and expertise as to why they believe HFA is a bad idea. For example, see the posts at 03/06/2019 02:37 and 03/07/2019 00:19 that cite recent studies--including a very relevant high school longitudinal study done by the University of Chicago--that showed harm to students from detracting. So please don't dismiss our concerns as "ranting".

The meta studies you cite are just not relevant. Both papers include elementary and middle school studies which are a wholly different animal than high school. And one paper includes studies from as far back as the 1920s - yes the 1920s!

We also need to face the fact that Wilson is actually unique in that we have a HUGE range of academic performance. Given its uniqueness, Wilson is what is referred to in statistics as "out of sample" which makes it difficult to draw relevant meaning from existing studies. I would argue that Wilson's uniqueness in this regard makes HFA likely to be even more harmful than what previous studies show. In other words, the larger the range in academic performance the greater the harm from HFA. To show this, simply imagine hypothetically that the range from low to high academic performance in a partiular classroom were really huge - say the equivalent of 4 grades. I think we all can agree that HFA would be a dramatic failure in such a circumstance. 
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