When an 'Honors' Course Isn't So Honorable
Q. It
used to be that only a tiny percentage of the students in a given high school
were taking "honors" courses, or Advanced Placement. Now, it looks like about
half the student body is in them. What gives?
Especially
in low-income or middle-income areas, a growing "keep up with the Joneses"
spirit has downgraded the quality of honors courses. If high-end public and
private schools are offering a lot of prestige courses called "advanced,"
"college prep" or "honors," making their students look better on college
admissions forms, then by golly, the low-end is going to follow suit, even if
those courses aren't living up to their billing.
First came
grade inflation, in which we had the specter of the top 10% of a senior class
having gradepoint averages better than a 4.0 - but scoring only so-so on
nationally standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT, and failing to score
high enough on Advanced Placement Tests to get any college credit.
That's a
red flag of phony grades that deceive parents into thinking their kids are
doing well and feeling good about their schools - and voting FOR bond issues
and spending-lid overrides and so forth.
Now we're
beginning to see how a student can have straight A's in honors courses and
still not be achieving all that high academically: the complexity and challenge
of honors courses has been diluted in many schools. There's even a name for the
phenomenon of dumbed-down "challenge" courses: "course-label inflation."
Perhaps in
Honors English, they are reading a classic or two. But instead of writing long,
well-documented research papers in which the prose has to be perfect, the
students might just be filling in worksheets, or videotaping themselves in
skits depicting certain scenes out of those books. "Honors" Spanish classes in
high school might actually be using middle-school workbooks, and so on.
In one
study, educational accountability researchers, Chrys Dougherty, Lynn Mellor and
Shuling Jian found that "course-label inflation" was 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 middle- and high-income students, and those who are white, were 36
and 32 percent, respectively.
U.S.
Education Department senior researcher Clifford Adelman, the government's
leading authority on the links between high school programs and college
completion, said some high school transcripts apply the label
"pre-calculus" to any math course before calculus. Ironically, some
students who had taken "pre-calculus" in high school had to take "algebra"
their freshman year in college after placement testing revealed their lack of
math achievement.
The answer:
the public should insist that schools be held far more accountable for
discrepancies between GPA's and actual achievement as measured by
nationally-standardized tests and college placements. A great place to start
would be to insist that the percentage of students who received college credit
by scoring well on Advanced Placement tests be published for each course in
each school. Then if 50% of the student body is in A.P. courses but less than
5% are getting college credit with them, the dumbed-down phenomenon will be
exposed.
By Susan Darst Williams • www.GoBigEd.com • Arithmetic,
Etc. 105 • © 2006
