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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous](Excepting from above comment die to screwed up quoting.)

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]

How do you know it worked in your school? From your perspective it did. And when I was tracked, it seemed like it was working, too. But “working” simply meant that I ended up in a class full of kids just like me, who had the advantages that ensured we tested well, had good work habits, had parents who expected us to go to college, etc. (Oh, and were almost exclusively white!) How is that “working”? All it did was reinforce the advantages and disadvantages built into society through intergenerational wealth transfer, housing segregation, etc.[/quote]

It worked darn well for me.  I was in G &T and then the highest level classes in middle and high school.  Your premise is that only white kids are in these classes.  That’s not true.  Maybe they are a majority but not exclusive.  [b]Why would you not want each child to be fully challenged?  How do you expect the top 10% of the class to be in with kids in the 50% or lower[/b]?  I live in DC and we are raising our son in DC.  If some of you DC parents want to to believe your illusion if you have a child in the top 10% of the class, that the child will be challenged to their full potential in honors for all so be it.  They won’t.
Education cannot fix external issues related to poverty, and if you think not tracking will, that’s your opinion. But we are out.  I know what’s it’s like to bored and not be challenged in school, and I would never wish it on any child let alone my child.  [/quote]

What the research has shown EVERY TIME that this has actually been studied is that in tiered classes the actually "top 10%" of the class (i.e. the smartest 10%) is NEVER ACTUALLY PLACED in the highest tier class.  Put another way, when researchers actually give a series of tests to kids, they find that there are many kids in the lowest level classes who score better than kids in the top level classes and many more who score better than kids in the intermediate classes.  In other words, the kids that everybody thinks are the "top 10%" aren't, and the kids that everybody thinks are the bottom 10% likewise aren't.  As far as I know, this is consistent every time this is studied.  You can claim that in your case it wasn't, but you should realize that almost everybody -- parents, teachers, students -- in the schools where the research was done said the same thing.

Also, if you can get access to the 1976 paper that I linked to above, you'll see that the dynamics in how school plays out for most of us (bored, disengaged, disruptive kids in "lower" classes, more engaged, higher achieving kids in "upper" classes) seem to be possible to replicate by pretty much randomly assigning kids to tiered classes.  Upper classes and gifted programs tend to be staffed by the most engaged teachers and be full of the kinds of kids whose parents push for them to be in gifted classes, so the class environment tends to be more engaging.  Likewise, lower classes tend to be taught by less engaged, less experienced teachers and to have fewer resources (not to mention the stigma of everybody involved knowing that they are in the dumb class), so the environment is less engaging and there is less success.

With respect to race, no one is saying that gifted and talented or top tier classes are ENTIRELY white (at least since the not since the 70s, when that was the explicit policy of many schools, like it was the policy of at least some recently desegregated schools to put black kids in special ed).  But again, EVERY TIME this has been studied, it's been shown that top tiered classes are DISPROPORTIONATELY non-minority and higher income.  Taken together, the evidence shows that richer, whiter kids tend to get put into top tier classes and poorer, browner kids tend to get put into lower classes to some extent REGARDLESS OF ABILITY (i.e. smart poor kids are to some extent put in lower classes and rich dumb kids in upper classes).  And, once tracking starts in lower grades, differences in achievement persist and grow partly because to the nature of the opportunities that kids get.  So, by high school,  the results that people take for granted and blame on society and the home environment can also to some extent be explained by school policy.

I am not at all sure that "honors for all" is the best or even a good solution.  Previously it was my understanding that kids at Wilson could be put in honors classes by asking for them, and there are certainly kids who don't want to be in honors (either they don't want to do the work or they struggle to pass on-level classes and feel that honors is setting them up to fail -- which was the case for one kid I know).  Involuntary tracking is a terrible and unfair solution, but I don't think that's what Wilson had.  When kids who could do the work CAN choose to be in honors and don't, then there are a bunch of much thornier issues to sort out, and I am not really competent to address them, as I suspect most PPs likewise aren't.

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