California High School Removing Honors English Classes to Promote Equity
“We are working to cultivate a liberated learning environment that is free of bias”
Rather than trying to lift people up, they are holding others back. It’s not right.
Campus Reform reports:
CA high school removes honors English classes for racial equity, following higher ed trend
The Culver City Unified School District (CCUSD) in California is citing racial equity as the reason for removing honors English classes for high school students, disadvantaging students hoping to compete for top universities.
This is part of a national pattern of K-12 school districts decreasing the potential higher education opportunities for students in order to advance a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda.
The Education Trust, an equity-focused think tank, claims that minority students “experience inequitable access to advanced coursework.”
CCUSD English teachers presented data to the school board earlier this month showing that Latino and Black students were underrepresented in honors and AP English classes, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Replacing honors classes with a one-size-fits-all curriculum is intended to “ensure students of all races receive an equal, rigorous education,” The Wall Street Journal reports school officials as saying.
Some CCUSD parents, however, do not see this as an opportunity to enrich their children.
One mother told Fox News, “My daughter, who is a sophomore has said that it’s not working … She’s now getting like an A+++ in her English class … [and] the class is kind of a joke.”
Pedro Frigola, a concerned father from CCUSD, told “Fox and Friends” that “right away [he] was troubled” by the district’s “Equity, Social Justice, and Inclusion Plan,” which justified the removal of honors English.
The CCUSD Equity Advisory Committee explains that “equity is [the district’s] moral obligation,” according to the PowerPoint document.
“We are working to cultivate a liberated learning environment that is free of bias,” the plan reads. Concrete objectives of the plan include increasing concepts of gender equity, LGBTQ+ issues, and critical race theory in classrooms.
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Comments
Equity = lowest common denominator. It can be no other way.
You can bet the Governor Newsome’s kid goes to a school with honors classes.
So that the talented kids get recognized and have better opportunities.
The parents at that private school would start a riot if the administrators dumbed it down.
When I was in high school (a looooonnnnnggg time ago) I took AP and honors classes because they were less boring than the regents or (shudder) general education alternatives. The chance to get a tiny amount of college credit was nice but not crucial.
So what this move is telling students and their parents is that the smart ones don’t belong. They should just go someplace else.
THAT is the actual purpose. They want to weed out those square pegs who are less easily manipulated and also not worth a penny of that special ed money.
That’s not how it works, Irv. They still very much want to keep the smart, capable kids. But they want to hobble their educations. It’s a highly malignant system.
The good news is that it doesn’t work. Regardless of where they go to school, smart kids will educate themselves and one another, while the dumb ones will be “cool” and have no future prospects. Teachers are, at best, catalysts for learning. The student is the one who has to learn. In the right environment, that’s less of a problem than is portrayed.
The problem comes in when teachers intentionally try to stymie learning. And sometimes they do.
It’s a shame that the “rigorous science” (sarc) behind “equity” has so pervaded all of the education establishment to the point where “the inmates are running the asylum”: literally, not figuratively.
This is is a realistic definition of “child abuse,” for which these soi-disant educators must be held responsible.
It’s apparent that the district’s “Equity, Social Justice, and Inclusion Plan” does not include actually teaching the student’s the subjects. They claim that “equity is [a] moral obligation.” Don’t they also have an obligation to produce graduates who can actually read, write, and do math first?
“Rigorous.” Right.
In California, the people can recall any elected official. California school boards are elected. The Superintendent needs a majority of the board to support her/him/they. There are probably five members of the school board. Time for recalls of at least three board members.
Our neighborhood high school dropped calculus for seniors because it hurt the feelings of students who weren’t smart enough to take it, whereas my son in a private school was taking linear algebra (with a small group of other students) as a senior having done calculus as a junior. The funny part is that some students do opt to take calculus at the local community college, which now functions as a place where people can take the courses that they should have taken in high school. It seems that every generation delays development by a year, except stealing cars, which seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
There is absolutely no reason to have an “English” honors class. With all the illegal aliens entering California, they will have a “Spanish” honors class in its place.
Well, the captive education grift expands like kudzu because it’s a three-fer: the rake-offs, election capture, and keeping the population under the boot to be harvested further.
A mission statement for public education that was for the country, the kids or the people would be something like this:
“We’re gonna liberate every kid’s education. That means support the hell out of every single one of them. And make available the hardest thing any of them can handle.
“We’re about reaching up, for everybody. We want kids demanding post-honors courses in everydamnthing, when they’ve grown beyond what we put together for them.
“Our message for kids in the earlier grades, different schools, every way you wanna slice them into groups — this is here for you, and we’re gonna help you get it if you want it. Everybody.”