School board holds special meeting tonight to address elimination of honors courses
From staff reports
Rockford Board of Education will hold a special meeting at 6:30 p.m., tonight (Tuesday, Dec. 7) at the District 205 Administration Building, 201 S. Madison St., to address the administration’s district-wide plans to cut honors courses.
School board members, teachers, staff, members of the public and the media have expressed frustration with what they perceive to be the administration’s failure to effectively communicate its plans to cut honors courses.
District 205 Superintendent Dr. LaVonne M. Sheffield sent a lengthy memo to all Board of Education members explaining her reasoning behind eliminating honors courses. Her memo was distributed to area media outlets Friday, Dec. 3, and can be viewed by clicking here.
In the memo, Sheffield explained how there was little difference between the curriculum offered in honors courses and regular courses and that honors courses tended to have a disproportionate percentage of white students. She asserted that students in honors courses performed only slightly better than students in regular courses on standardized tests, and that all students in the district could benefit from having the curriculum standards raised in all classrooms to meet the standards of honors courses.
Sheffield also drew a distinction between traditional honors courses and Advanced Placement (AP) courses, emphasizing that only honors courses would be eliminated and that students seeking more challenging courses could simply take AP courses.
Sheffield explained in her memo: “Advanced Placement classes can bolster a high school transcript and improve the chances of being accepted into college. Honors courses are usually considered less rigorous than AP courses. Honors programs vary widely from school to school, and colleges recognize this. AP courses are governed by the College Board. Teachers have to teach specific topics that would typically be covered during freshman year of college. The College Board requires that all instructors for AP classes submit and have an approved syllabus. Therefore, many colleges will take into account the context of a high school’s accelerated programs; scrutinize closely how many AP courses are available to a student, as well as overall course load. In other words, you can take honors courses and receive straight A’s but score 13 on your ACT and not gain admission to college.”
Ultimately, Sheffield’s memo concluded, “we can offer a variety of challenging courses through the combination of honors and AP sections. At the same time, by filling courses to a minimum of 30 students, we can eliminate 46 FTEs [full-time equivalent positions] and save $3.4 million. I hope this memo has been helpful in further explaining the sound rationale behind the Administration’s decision-making.”
The district faces a $41 million deficit that is expected to inflate to $50 million for the 2012 school year.
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Her memo sounds good, but is mostly politician double-speak. For example, she talks about the only difference between honors geometry and regular geometry being that students in honors are required to write proofs. So, because we want to raise rigor for all students, everyone should be doing proofs. Easy, right? Well, it actually turns into a pretty big difference because the two textbooks are geared in radically different directions. The Honors Geometry book has examples and problems for proofs in every chapter. The Regular Geometry book only discusses proofs in one chapter of the entire book, the majority of material being geared toward algebra-type problems using geometric concepts. If you want to raise the rigor, you’ll need to use the honors textbooks! So, ~$70/book * 33/students in a class * 12 current allocations of regular geometry per high school (some variation between schools, but this is a good average number) * 4 high schools = $110,880 worth of textbooks that will have to be purchased. If you’re going to be billing this as money-saving, you need to account for the extra costs involved as well. But, quite frankly, you haven’t thought it through and you don’t even have a realistic sense of how much $$$ will actually be saved in the end (if any, it could actually end up costing the district more).
This is not going to save money. Few teachers are certified to teach AP. You have to have AP CERTIFICATION! We are going to have to pay teachers to go get certified, which means subs will have to be hired while these teachers go out of the building to get certified. How will this save money?
Also, the fact that there is little difference in the list of topics teachers cover does not mean that the classes are not different. Both regular and honor may be covering characterization, but whereas regular may discuss who the main character is, honors may discuss character motivations, comparisons, upper-level analysis and predictions, real world thinking, and so on. It’s all characterization; it’s just different elements of it.
And before anyone says “Well, everyone deserves the same rigor,” it’s not a matter of deserving. In regular classes, it takes the first week to get the students to understand a certain topic, while the honors class grasps it in a much quicker time, thus making it necessary and possible to move on to higher levels of thinking. It is not a matter of fairness; it is a matter of time and ability!
Teach the students starting from where they are at. We will make students feel stupid if we teach them way below or way above where they are. You want real differentiation? Teach them at the levels where they need to be taught! That’s real fairness. Anything else is not serving the students; it’s serving an adult.
The lower performing students will perform less because they will feel dumber next to the smarter kids, and the higher performing students will perform less because they will not receive higher-level thinking activities since their teachers will be so busy paying attention to the lower performing students.