In Many Classrooms, 'Honors' in Name Only
Experts also worry about courses that promise mastery in a subject but fail to follow through. Call it course-label inflation.
The educational accountability center's researchers, Chrys Dougherty, Lynn Mellor and Shuling Jian, found course-label inflation particularly harmful to low-income and minority students. They said 60 percent of low-income students, 65 percent of African American students and 57 percent of Hispanic students who had received course credit for geometry or algebra 2 in Texas failed a state exam covering material from geometry and algebra 1. By contrast, the failure rates for non-low-income and white students were 36 and 32 percent, respectively.
In Many Classrooms, 'Honors' in Name Only
As High Schools Offer More Advanced Courses, Educators Fear Content Doesn't Always Earn the Label
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 19, 2006; A10
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091800991.html
During a visit in March to an honors sophomore English class in an impoverished area of Connecticut, Robyn R. Jackson heard the teacher declare proudly that her students were reading difficult texts. But Jackson noticed that their only review of those books was a set of work sheets that required little thought or analysis.
Jackson, an educational consultant and former Gaithersburg High School English teacher, sought an explanation from a school district official. He sighed and told her, "We have a lot of work to do to help teachers understand what true rigor is."
posted by Whitney Tilson at 10:10 AM
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