Brookline High School should keep honors and enriched classes in the curriculum. Elimination hurts our kids, our public school system, and equity.
Unleveling classes is an illogical response to Black and Hispanic under-representation in enriched and honors courses. Figuring out how to get Black and Hispanic kids into enriched and honors courses is logical (e.g. providing more support in elementary school). What if data showed that more Black and Hispanic children were doing better in math than white children – should we eliminate math to eliminate this statistic? The rationale that obfuscating statistics protects equity is flawed.
Unleveling drains community resources. Some parents will move from Brookline or move their children to private school. Teachers who prefer to teach honors or enriched classes will leave Brookline High School.
Unleveling hurts the public school system because it makes teaching harder for teachers. Imagine a ninth-grade child who loves Shakespeare because they want to understand how he perceived the human condition. Imagine another ninth grader who reads at the sixth-grade level. How does a teacher teach English to a class containing these two children? Setting different goals for different kids in the same class does not solve this teacher’s dilemma.