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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It sounds like an excellent model and a common sense, simple and effective approach to the a racial inequity that should not exist in the first place. I hope they continue it.[/quote]

So all common sense about creating tiered classes and really pushing the highest achievers doesn’t matter as long as each class is diverse.  I’m genuinely curious about parents who putt diversity over all other academic pursuits for their kids.[/quote]

The main issues with tiered classes is that pretty much every time they have been studied, it's been clearly shown that students aren't actually assigned to tiers based on ability, so the entire basis for this model is completely flawed from the start:

"The Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) was a comprehensive survey of mathematics taught and learned around the world... For the SIMS study, 8th graders in all four tracks completed a pretest of pre-algebra arithmetic skills at the beginning of the year. Researchers examined the distribution of scores on the test by student and by math track. Although it was expected that class-type performance would be different, Kifer and colleagues' (1993) analysis of student and classroom performance found considerable score overlap among tracks.

[b]Only half of the students who achieved the top 10 scores on the pretest and one-third of the students in the top 25 had actually been placed in the algebra-level classes.[/b] Inequities existed on the other end of the proficiency spectrum as well: [b]Nearly 50 percent of the students assigned to remedial classes had scores that were better than 25 percent of the students in general math.[/b] In addition, Kifer and colleagues found that [b]5 of the 23 remedial classes had higher mean scores than 75 percent of the students in general math, 50 percent of the students in pre-algebra, and 25 percent of the students in algebra.[/b]"

https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7342.html

These results have been replicated repeatedly -- over and over and over in school district after school district.

Some other issues:
1. The research shows that tiered classes are largely ineffective and increasing student learning.

2. The quality of teaching is lower in lower-track classes. Less experienced teachers tend to teach them, fewer resources are devoted to them and teachers are less engaged.

Here's an abstract of one of the first articles to systematically make these points:  https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7342.html.

Basically. like a lot of "common sense", tiered classrooms totally fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

[/quote]

Thank you, this is so helpful.[/quote]

Truly. This is such important information to have in this conversation. [/quote]

So why not just use a test to assign people to classes?

In my high school growing up, the smartest and most academic students were in the advanced classes; the struggling students were not.  In between, among the generally bright students, there were surely some imperfect assignments, but overall it worked well.  [/quote]

The research suggests that tracking didn’t work as well as you think it did in your school.  That’s why research is critical - kids, teachers and parents often think they in the right classes, but when they are tested it turns out they never are. [/quote]

And yet it did work well in my school.  The suggestion of the research is not accurate in that case.

But this is the main point: According to the  above research, even when the placements were done subjective teacher decisions (rather than more objectively by test), the errors were between advanced and the two general levels or between the general levels and remedial.

*Despite some randomness in the middle, they still were not putting the most struggling and the most advanced in the same class, which is exactly what ‘Honors for All” does.*[/quote]

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