Opinion: Future of 'Earned Honors' Matters In D202 Election

To the editor: 

In the April 9 election, Evanstonians will vote for four members of the District 202 School Board.   One of the biggest issues in this election is the future of "honors" education.  ETHS recently adopted an "earned honors" program. Previously, only kids who scored at least 95% on an 8th grade standardized test were allowed into the honors track at the high school. Now, all students reading at or above grade level are placed in earned honors for Freshman Humanities (English and History) and Freshman Biology. These students are taught at the honors level and have the opportunity to earn honors credit and be placed in future honors level classes. Honors criteria have been revamped to align with AP level expectations. The skills necessary for success in an AP class are scaffolded to the Freshman level to prepare students for these classes.  

Experts from Northwestern University, Harvard University and the American Institutes for Research are evaluating the impact of this program. Results will be made public in the Fall of 2014.  The success of the program at that time will be measured in terms of ACT scores and AP test scores; farther down the line, as I understand it, it will be measured in terms of college admissions and success.   

Many parents are concerned that their academically successful kids are being penalized by the new program.  Under the old system, my kids, future ETHS students, would be quite likely to end up in the Honors track based on their current academic success.  And I have found District 65 disappointing in its approach to serving the many gifted students in this highly-educated city.   At the same time, I am deeply concerned about educational inequities that mean that other kids do not have the opportunity to achieve at their full potential.  This can really feel like a trade-off:  my kids really need to be challenged in order to be happy (not because I need to get them into a prestigious college some day).  But I do not want their educational needs to be met at the expense of the needs of other kids.  

So I wanted to learn about the new Honors program at ETHS.  Having learned about it, I have decided to vote for candidates for the ETHS Board who seem most committed to drawing on ongoing and varied evaluations of the program to continuously improve it for all students, rather than those who seem most suspicious of the program.   We have the amazing good fortune to have a program designed according to the latest educational research about helping students of all levels achieve, and we have top-level researchers working pro bono to evaluate it.  If it is not working in some respects, it can be adjusted.   However, research shows that kids will learn more if they are challenged more, whatever level they start at.  This has also been my experience as a teacher at Loyola University Chicago, where there is a wide range of academic ability in my classes.   

At least one of the candidates has criticized the program because grades have gone down for some students in the new Honors classes.  As an educator, I'm deeply troubled by the idea that we should judge the new program on the grade trajectory.  Grades are relative to the course approach and material. In my experience, when grades go down, learning is often going up, not down, because students are actually being challenged in ways that will give them greater success later.   I teach in the Honors program at Loyola and I have far higher hopes for the students who work hard and are interested in mastering material than I have for those who are primarily trying to scratch out the best grades.  Students who get a B while improving core skills are likely to do better in their later classes - as they themselves tell me - and I would think something similar would occur in this curriculum.  

The new Honors program at ETHS lets students know what material they have to master in order to enter into AP and Honors classes in their junior year, and then gives them tools to master the material.  This empowers students and gives them something to work toward.  Furthermore, the new approach emphasizes not just content but skills.  This is good pedagogy.  I would like to encounter students in my college classrooms who have been educated this way in high school.  As a parent, I believe that this program could be very good for my own kids.  I do not know this yet, but I think it is very possible, and I look forward to the results of the evaluations, and to ongoing conversations about how this program can work for all students.  In any case, the former system seems to poorly serve a large number of ETHS students who are capable of mastering the Honors material but are not going to be able to demonstrate this on an 8th grade standardized test.  

I will be voting for candidates who are clearly committed to an Honors program that allows a wider range of students to engage and master the Honors curriculum, and who will utilize various forms of program evaluation to continuously improve education for all students at ETHS, rather than moving back toward a program that has been too exclusive.  In particular, I will be voting for Patricia Savage-Williams, Casey Miller, Bill Geiger, and Elena Garcia Ansani. 

Sincerely,

Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar