Dylan Brogan
School district officials want to end the standalone honors classes taught at East High, above, and Madison's other high schools.
The “time is now” to eliminate standalone honors classes in Madison high schools, according to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins. At a Dec. 5 school board meeting, Jenkins said a “racist attitude” underlies support for keeping separate classes that offer more rigorous coursework to students.
“We are no longer going to uphold what is considered to be a segregated mentality,” Jenkins said. “We should work together to get it done.”
To replace traditional honors classes, Jenkins wants to expand the district’s current Earned Honors program to all core classes — English, math, science and social studies — offered to Madison freshmen and sophomores. Earned Honors started in 2017 and is at different stages of implementation at each high school. The program allows students to receive an honors credit on their transcript by doing extra work while enrolled in a non-honors class.
District officials first informed the board in April 2021 that they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. But administrators in February “hit pause” on that plan “to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” This fall, however, staff began moving forward with plans to expand Earned Honors while sunsetting standalone honors classes for freshmen in 2023 and sophomores in 2024.
The policy shift didn’t need board approval but, according to The Capital Times, members Christina Gomez Schmidt and Nicki Vander Muelen requested a vote. Board president Ali Muldrow now says it’s “likely” the board will vote on two issues at its meeting on Dec. 19: whether to expand the Earned Honors program and whether to eliminate standalone honors classes.
Muldrow expressed support for eliminating standalone honors when the idea was first presented to the board. But since the district formally presented its policy proposal at the board’s Dec. 5 meeting, Muldrow says she plans on voting yes to expanding Earned Honors and no on eliminating standalone honors.
“What we need to do is focus on the rollout and the integrity of the expansion of earned honors. And I think the elimination of standalone honors needs to be separate from the conversation,” Muldrow told the podcast City Cast Madison (the author of this story produces the podcast). “I think you have to be attached to the outcomes.”
The district’s six-page policy proposal states the primary goal of eliminating standalone honors in favor of Earned Honors is to dismantle “a tiered system of courses.”
“Earned Honors supports the commitments made by teachers, principals, and Central Office staff to accelerate learning for all students as we work towards becoming an anti-racist institution,” states the district’s proposal. “If we increase access to rigorous standards-aligned instruction for all students while building agency in all students, then we will increase the number of students succeeding in advanced coursework.”
According to data provided by the district in April 2021, 60 percent of students in standalone honors are white and 40 percent are students of color. Any student can elect to take a standalone honors course but the demographics of those classes mirror other racial disparities in Madison schools. Meanwhile, students who participate in Earned Honors are 54 percent students of color.
At the Dec. 5 meeting, board members Laura Simkin and Christina Gomez Schmidt expressed support for expanding Earned Honors but questioned the wisdom of eliminating standalone honors without defining metrics to gauge effectiveness. They were also critical of the lack of input from families, students, and staff.
“There is a moral imperative to do this work. But the planning has to go first,” Gomez Schmidt said.
Board members' questions about the plan were met with pushback from district officials, including La Follette High School English teacher Deidre Jarecki, who helped develop Earned Honors with Central Office staff.
“You pay me to be a professional in my field,” Jarecki said. “It’s frustrating, though, hearing that it sounds like you feel like we have no plan. And we have been busting our butts on this.”
Bri Marshall, an English teacher from West High School who also helped design the Earned Honors program, also seemed frustrated by board members' concerns about the district’s plan.
“I just got to name it — what we are protecting by keeping standalone honors spaces are white spaces,” said Marshall. “There is a problem with that. I have [an] issue with us continuing to put up walls that make it inaccessible for some of our students.”
Michael Jones, president of Madison Teachers Inc., says his members both support and oppose the plan so the union is not taking any position on the proposal.
A chief criticism of the district’s policy is that it assumes that Earned Honors provides the same level of academic rigor as standalone honors. La Follette senior Yoanna Hoskins, the student representative on the board, relayed her experience with Earned Honors at the Dec. 5 meeting.
“All we did was just one project and then got honors credit. It wasn’t hard,” Hoskins said. “How many projects will [students] have to do to get an honors credit? Will it be more than one?”
Yogesh Chawla, parent to an O’Keeffe Middle School student and a Dane County supervisor, watched the board’s Dec. 5 meeting. He was disappointed by the defensiveness shown by district officials.
“I was surprised to see the district’s year-end push to get rid of standalone honors classes with little to no outreach to parents or any solid plan to do so. The current Earned Honors classes lack the rigor of standalone honors classes, and it does not increase equity to remove learning options especially when standalone honors classes are open to all scholars,” Chawla told Isthmus. “I am hoping with declining enrollments and staff vacancies that the administration will focus on getting our schools back on solid footing as we continue to recover from the COVID pandemic.”
At the end of the meeting, Gomez Schmidt said she was “highly disappointed” by the tenor of the conversation.
“I truly do believe we can meet the needs of all students without dismantling the opportunities that we have available. And instead dismantle the barriers,” said Gomez Schmidt. “I think we are defining a flashpoint here that doesn’t need to be a flashpoint.”
