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][quote=Anonymous]
[b]You misrepresent the research.[/b] And your link is to a paper from 1987, which is now over thirty years old. An honest assessment of the research is that it shows that non-tracked programs hurt the lowest and highest performing students. This is not a surprise to anyone who has attended a school or taught at one.:) 
[/quote]

Actually, I don't.  And as I noted in my later post, I'm not convinced that honors for all is a good approach.  What I did say, and the research shows, and you haven't responded to, is that tracking EVERY TIME IT'S BEEN STUDIED has been shown to mis-assign students (putting lower ability students in higher track classes and vice versa) in ways that mean wealthy, whiter kids end up higher tier classes much more often than their academic attainment alone would dictate.  You didn't respond to my actual point at all.  And I'm in no way misrepresenting the research, you're just responding to points that I didn't make with long excerpts from a tangentially related study. [/quote]

Me again.  Had a look at the study you cited (https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/publications/College%20Prep%207x10-10-%20final%20082610.pdf).  A couple of points:

- Page 7 makes the EXACT point that my posts have been making, to wit:  An extensive body of research documents this social stratification in educational opportunities and outcomes and identifies strong and pervasive links between students’ academic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds and the quality and academic demand of their high school courses.

- The Chicago policies eliminated remedial classes.  What I've seen about "honors for all" stressed that remedial classes and additional resources would be available to kids who needed them.

- The finding that putting kids in more advanced classes increased failure rates is one that I've made a couple of times already in this thread.  I know a kid that this happened to who ended up transferring from Wilson because if it and is now doing better at a charter high school.

So, again, I'm not convinced that honors for all is a good approach (and I have more concerns after seeing this paper).  But -- mountains of evidence, including evidence cited in this study, document the pervasive inequities of traditional tracking (i.e. putting smart brown kids in lower classes and less smart white kids in higher classes).  The trend that's arisen over the past 20 years or more in response to the limitations of tracking (differentiation) is also problematic in that it's next to impossible to accomplish.

My impression is that there needs to be a more technology-enabled solution that allows for individualized, differentiated instruction, but I don't know that there's evidence supporting that approach. [/quote]

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