The forever war over tracking

People are always getting mad at me for talking about race and IQ. Why do you obsess over race and IQ when nobody else in the entire world ever thinks about it? Well, as Trotsky might have said, you may not be interested in race and IQ, but race and IQ are interested in you. Thus, the endless stream of newspaper articles obsessing over my obsessions, just more obtusely. 

For example, I've long pointed out the never-ending struggle between parents (and the better sort of teachers) and educrats over tracking within schools. The educartel hates tracking because it makes clear racial differences in intelligence. 

Here's an article from the Washington Post that illustrates a lot of iSteve themes.  And, allow me to compliment reporter Kevin Sieff for doing a good job of laying out the facts honestly and intelligently.

School districts move away from honors classes in favor of AP courses
By Kevin Sieff, Published: May 22 

Not long ago, honors courses were considered a hallmark of student achievement, a designation that impressed colleges and made parents beam. 

Now, those courses are vanishing from public schools nationwide as administrators move toward a more inclusive curriculum designed to encourage underrepresented minority students to join their high-achieving peers in college-level Advanced Placement classes. 

Fairfax County’s public schools are at the forefront of the movement, nudging would-be honors students toward more-rigorous AP courses, despite criticism from some parents that eliminating honors will have the reverse effect and lead some students to choose less-demanding “standard education” classes instead of AP.

A little background: the Washington D.C. suburbs have some of the smartest kids and most educationally ambitious parents in the country. The suburban public schools are also pretty diverse racially, so not everybody is so motivated.

High schools used to offer regular and honors tracks, but then ambitious parents demanded an even higher track of Advanced Placement courses. So, three tracks became standard, which seemed to make these hard-charging parents happy. Say you have a 120 IQ kid and a 100 IQ kid. The first one goes into AP and the second one goes into the middle track, Honors, where he'll be with the more average whites and the smarter blacks and Latinos, but he won't be pushed beyond his capabilities. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? What parents of average kids fear is a two track system where their kid either is in over his head in AP or is in with the 80 IQ kids in the only other track.

Honors courses are generally taught from the same lesson plan as regular classes but at a faster pace and in greater depth. An AP course contains altogether more-challenging material — charting a path that coheres to national standards, which are heavily endorsed by the Fairfax school system. 

This fall, Fairfax will discontinue honors-level courses in subjects where an AP class is offered, drawing the ire of parents who want to restore what they call an academic middle ground. They have formed a group called Restore Honors Courses.  ...

Considerable opposition from Fairfax parents has prompted the school board to review its decision to do away with high school honors courses that for years served as an alternative to basic and AP courses. But it remains unclear whether local advocates of honors courses can resist a national trend to reduce the number of “tracks” for students.

“Honors courses are drying up in many districts across the country because of the push to democratize Advanced Placement classes,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some schools in Illinois, New York, Oregon and several other states have begun phasing out the distinction. 

But, this reasonable system drives educrats crazy for PC reasons, who want to go back to two tracks to push lots of NAMs into AP by not letting them take mere Honors.

The good news about educrats is that they aren't very bright and aren't very good at predicting the effects of policies. So, if a trend comes along like Advanced Placement that increases tracking, Ed-school educated educrats seldom notice ahead of time that AP will have massive disparate impact. They drink their own Kool-Aid. Who could have known that AP classes were actually tracking in disguise and that whites and Asians would wind up in AP classes more than blacks and Mexicans? To predict requires prejudice and that's the worst thing in the whole world.

So, the educrats didn't organize effectively to put up a fight against parents' and the better teachers' demands for AP. But, now, the truth has finally dawned on them so they are fighting back by trying to fill AP courses with NAMs.

But the problem is that a lot of the smarter NAMs are smart enough to know they aren't smart enough to take a lot of AP courses. So, if the AP carrot isn't working, the educrats are going to wield the stick by taking away mid-range Honors courses, making the bottom of the barrel the only alternative to AP. The plan is to scare the 100 IQ NAMs into AP courses with 120 IQ Asians and whites.

That trend has reduced the number of levels available in a given subject area. A decade ago, nearly all school systems offered at least three tracks in high school — usually regular, honors and Advanced Placement. Now, many have shifted to two options, as Fairfax will in the fall. Some have gone even further, placing all students in a single track. 

“We’ve found that traditionally underrepresented minorities do not access the most-rigorous track when three tracks are offered. But when two tracks are offered, they do,” said Peter Noonan, Fairfax’s assistant superintendent for instructional services. 

Increasingly, educators are using AP test data to measure the disparity between white students and their black and Hispanic peers, revealing a profound achievement gap in high-level courses. 

African Americans, for example, represented 14.6 percent of the total high school graduating class last year, but they made up less than 4 percent of the AP student population who earned a score of three or higher on at least one exam, each of which is weighted on a five-point scale. 

Many underrepresented minority students are able to handle college-level coursework but are intimidated by the AP label, Noonan says. In Fairfax, where students choose their own course schedule with guidance from teachers and counselors, administrators are eager to give students incentives to take AP classes. 

But in reducing the hierarchy of available courses, Fairfax has left students such as W.T. Woodson High School’s Conor Wade unsatisfied. 

Wade is now taking 11th-grade basic — or standard education — English, which he says is “not at all challenging.” He’s enrolled in two AP courses and is not ready to take a third. “It’s like choosing between two extremes,” he said. “An honors class would be perfect — something in the middle.” 

“It is the position of Fairfax County Public Schools that AP and IB courses, where available, provide the best education opportunity for our students,” district officials wrote in a recent memo to parents, using the acronym for International Baccalaureate. ... 

But concerned Fairfax parents have analyzed enrollment data at Woodson, which show that a significant number of students who took honors classes in 10th grade dropped to standard education, instead of elevating to AP courses, once the honors option was eliminated in 11th grade. 

“Instead of encouraging them to take more-advanced courses, eliminating honors pushes students backward, to less-challenging courses,” said Megan McLaughlin, a member of Restore Honors Courses. 

Other parents and analysts worry that students will be coaxed into taking AP courses even if they are unprepared for college-level rigor, slowing the pace of learning and setting up some students to fail. 

Officials at some low-income urban schools point to encouraging minority students to take AP courses as a critical element in closing the achievement gap. But in suburbs nationwide, parents of high-achieving students have threatened to leave school districts that are eliminating honors courses and reducing the number of tracks available, a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “bright flight.” 

In Fairfax, school board members call the issue one of the most divisive they’ve discussed. In response to parent opposition, they have announced a work session in July to reevaluate it. 

“Parents want more choices for their children, not fewer choices,” said Sandy Evans, a school board member representing Mason. “Eliminating the middle ground forces students to choose between being bored and being overwhelmed.” If Evans has her way, honors courses will be restored as soon as possible.

So, by now, AP is sacrosanct. The educrats can't get rid of AP classes. So, to reduce tracking they are trying to get rid of the mid-level Honors courses.

If educrats were smarter, they'd be more dangerous. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer