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

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

Sorry at some point the studies don't matter and you have to use common sense

If you have kids who are multiple levels behind grade level with kids who are multiple levels above grade level there is no way a teacher can differentiate across that wide gap especially in high school.  A teacher will most likely teach on grade level.  So what happens is the kids on the bottom will struggle and some might drop out since there is no lower level and the material is way beyond their ability.  Meanwhile the kids at the top will be extremely bored with the material and have essentially wasted a year of school.  Additionally on both sides there will most likely be discipline issues because the class is not relevant to the top bottom or the top.  [/quote]

You can go ahead and take medications, have medical procedures, and buy cars whose safety and efficacy are determined by common sense. I'll stick with science, thanks. "Common sense" used to suggest that evil spirits made people ill.[/quote]

There is a huge difference between your examples and what we are talking about here. Take for example the efficacy of a medication. It's very difficult to know how a complex, dynamic system such as a human patient will react to a new medication. That is often outside any common sense intuition because most people--including sometimes even the experts--don't know really understand the body works/reacts. And as such, you need controlled experiments to tease out the efficacy.

But we all have been students and many, including myself, have taught. So we have useful [u]experience[/u] and intuition about what happens when you attempt to teach students of vastly different abilities and vastly different motivation in the same classroom. And as parents, we have seen the negative impact of this dynamic as early as 7th grade. So I respectfully offer that it is unwise to dismiss common sense in this instance. [/quote]

Absolutely.  Economist here from a few pages back.

Re: “science”: forty years ago, “studies” said that fat was terrible and carbs were good for you.  Turned out that nutrition is very difficult to nail down (like education), and a bunch of corporate sugar interests were able to influence nutrition studies.  If forty years ago you had used common sense and rejected those crappy sugar studies, you would have been better off.

Cars and medicine are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT scientific fields than education (and nutrition).*  Be really really careful you’re using a high-quality study before you cite an education study.

* also, note that literally *hundreds of billions of dollars* have gone into funding for medical research, just in the past 5 years. Same with automotive research, development, and testing.  Nutrition and education spend way way way less on research.[/quote]

Economist-basher from a few pages back here  :lol: .  I think you are on solid ground when you critique the quality of studies, note the paucity of investment in gathering evidence, question the representativeness of the sample population, or point out that there's a big incentive for political manipulation of results. I didn't really agree with you on those points when this thread started, but now I'm more convinced.

I'm less convinced by using hindsight to champion "common sense."  Bacteria as the cause of infection was rejected in the US for years after if was scientifically demonstrated and widely accepted in Europe (and hospital procedures updated accordingly), and a lot of people died as a result of US doctors' embrace of "common sense".  Rather than arguing for "common sense", I'd suggest that the evidence isn't there to justify radically changing things in the way that HFA is doing.   To me "common sense" can be used to argue for a multitude of things, some of them pretty nefarious.  I also think it makes sense to argue for measures to address the shortcomings of the previous system (e.g. that some middle schools recommended zero percent of their kids for honors, while others recommended 100%).  Other posters have suggested testing, but that seems like an enormous administrative burden.  I wonder if instead of HFA there was a push to have kids try AN honors class in a subject that they cared about, teacher recommendations not withstanding?  [/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