Reply to What's the point of honors?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm completely confused.

This is our first semester in the Montgomery County System. We  have a 7th grader (Westland) and a 9th grader (BCC)

So... math the kids are tracked.  Any my 9th grader is in AP GOV. The rest of their regular academic classes are all marked honors (except science for the 7th grader b/c I guess there isn't' any).  However, all of their classes are mixed on level and honers.  AND, there is no differentiation in the class.  Even to the extreme where my 9th grader's English teacher (a class of mixed on level and honors students) told them if that if there schedule isn't marked honors they should ask to be switched into honors because then they will get the extra point for their GPAs.

Two questions.  Are there classes that are actually honors only?  Do I just need to ask for them to be placed elsewhere?

What is even the point of having an honors track?  It seems terribly unfair that some students that are supposedly already ahead (as indicated by the honors designation) get a grade boost for the same work as other students.  I feel like I must be missing something.

I don't need/want my kids to be in honors classes but I would like them to be challenged.  And yes, we come from an equally strong (probably stronger) district, so my kids should be in the more difficult classes in this county. 
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I hate to say it, but in the W and BCC clusters, GPA is everything.  We are in a non-W cluster where there's more of a division between on level and honors b/c the parents won't complain as much.  There are general science courses in HS that are all marked honors.  So it's a numbers game with the county.

The standards are the same, OP.  English 9 - honors and OL - is built around the Common Core Standards, which are very rigorous and complex.  Multiple objectives can be embedded into one CC Standard, for example.

The guides are rigorous, as the expectation is that students write and write and write while learning about expository/explanatory & narrative writing and the basic components of argument.   Students in honors courses should be challenged with more complex texts, and that might include framing a text by having students research the historical context around it.  So while an OL class would have the same assignment, students may end up researching more tertiary sources - like encyclopedia articles - while honors students would be introduced to primary documents, scholarly journals, and newspaper sources.

The end game is the PARCC ELA assessment, which is no joke.

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