Equity in education is currently making the rounds, with school districts implementing it and parents pushing back.
WSJ: Eliminate Honors Classes (no paywall version)
“We really feel equity means offering opportunities to students of diverse backgrounds, not taking away opportunities for advanced education and study,” Joanna Schaenman, a Culver City parent who helped spearhead the effort, said in the run-up to the meeting.
That isn’t what equity means. Equity means reduce opportunities so that the smartest student can’t learn any more than the average kid. The learning disabled are left out of the discussion.
When I first started teaching, I was too dumb to know about equity and social justice. I did know that Physics explained everything in the universe and I wanted my students to see that. I was also too dumb to know that working class students at Normandy weren’t going to become engineers.
If I had a Philosophy of Education at that time, it would be to get every student to accomplish more than they thought they could.
Building things is fun, so we entered engineering competitions at CWRU.
Back then, students could drive themselves. It wasn’t a class project or an official club, just something students could do if they wanted. A dozen kids the first year, then more the next. It wasn’t long before Normandy was a regional power in balsa wood bridge building.
I didn’t want my students to just be number-crunchers, but to see the wonder of Physics in everything. Amusement park physics is standard now, but it wasn’t typical when I started. I think administration allowed a new teacher to plan a Cedar Point Physics Day because they didn’t mind having a bunch of juniors and seniors out of the building toward the end of the school year.
My students were as dumb as I was. They didn’t know that working class kids from a school with no AP math or science classes could become engineers, so they went to college and became engineers. It’s hard to say, but in my eight years at Normandy, something like a hundred became engineers.
Equity is bullshit. So is diversity. Every student is unique. Everyone has their own aptitudes, motivation and ambition. Teachers should challenge every student to get farther than they thought they could.
