The Madison school district is delaying its plan to eliminate standalone honors classes at its high schools.
The district hasn’t publicly announced the policy shift or if it’s considering scrapping the plan entirely. At its Dec. 6 meeting, school board members were told by Director of Advanced Learning Sharon Alexander that the district was on track to end standalone honors classes for 9th graders starting in the 2022 fall semester and 10th graders in 2023. Isthmus learned the plan was being delayed from a high school teacher in January. It took district spokesperson Tim LeMonds three weeks to confirm what administrators had already told teachers.
“Standalone and earned honors will still be available for 9th and 10th graders next year,” wrote LeMonds in a Feb. 8 email to Isthmus. “We have put a pause on the removal of standalone honors to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.”
District administrators informed the Madison school board at an April 5, 2021, board meeting they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. These courses are for core subject areas like biology, English, and history. There are no exams or other requirements to get into these classes and any student is allowed to enroll. Instead of standalone honors courses, the district was going to focus exclusively on the “Earned Honors” program. Begun in 2017, this program allows students to receive honors designation in non-honors classes if they complete “predetermined criteria.”
Administrators at the April 5 meeting enthusiastically endorsed eliminating standalone honors classes.
“This is an anti-racist strategy. Earned honors supports our commitment to truly becoming an anti-racist institution. It allows us to set a bar of excellence for all of our students, for 100 percent of our students,” said Kaylee Jackson, executive director for curriculum. “[Standalone honors classes] are an exclusionary practice in which only some students within our high schools are receiving this rigorous instruction and capable of receiving honors credit.”
According to the latest data from the district, 41 percent of students in standalone honors classes are students of color. White students represent 43 percent of the total student population in the district, but make up 59 percent of standalone honors classes.
Most school board members expressed support at the meeting for eliminating standalone honors, although no vote was taken to either move forward or reject the idea. Board member Ananda Mirilli said she was “100 percent behind” the plan, a sentiment echoed by board member Savion Castro.
“Why are we holding on to this concept of standalone honors when all the data tells us that our Black and brown students don’t feel like they belong in that concept?” Castro asked.
Board member Christina Gomez Schmidt did question whether the district was prepared to offer advanced learning opportunities with just the Earned Honors program. She did so again at a Dec. 6 board meeting: “I still haven’t seen a plan for implementation. Before it happens, I’d like to see that plan.”
Some parents were baffled by the district’s proposal to move away from traditional honors courses and have lobbied the district to reconsider the plan.
“Standalone honors classes are a fantastic success story for all demographics and MMSD should be working to get more students into them rather than killing them off,” one parent wrote in a statement submitted to the school board in January 2022. “Students self-select themselves into standalone honors classes as a way of saying, ‘I am a serious student who wants to learn’…. 41 percent ARE STUDENTS OF COLOR. To many of them, standalone honors classes are a critical refuge from the stigmas and peer pressure that might otherwise lead them down a different academic track.”
According to the district’s website, the Earned Honors program allows students to receive an honors designation in some courses by “earning a C or better” and having “an average of 3.2 or higher on predetermined performance assessments.” Another parent wrote to the board that Earned Honors wasn’t what he or his child expected.
“Earned Honors courses do not even begin to provide the benefits of being in a class with motivated students doing material that is at an appropriately challenging level,” wrote the parent in January. “Earned Honors courses have been miserable for my high schooler to sit through, provide little challenge, and don't provide the community of similarly motivated scholars.”
One veteran high school teacher, who asked for anonymity, isn’t opposed to the Earned Honors program and hasn’t heard about any resistance from her colleagues, either. But she’s taught standalone honors classes, too, and says there's a difference.
“Earned Honors gives kids the label, it doesn't provide access to a better quality of education. They're just doing a project at the end of the semester that downtown gets to decide,” the teacher tells Isthmus. “It’s not different work or a different pace. It’s not giving students of color access to advanced learning.”
The educator believes the district is delaying the plan to eliminate standalone honors classes because of pushback from parents.
“The fear is we will have massive white flight,” says the teacher. “We are already starting to see it just with all the negative news coming out of the high schools.”
Gordon Allen, a Black senior, is going to Stanford next year. He’s taken a lot of honors classes at East. He says students of color not feeling like they belong in honors courses is a problem.
“I think this is a support issue, not an ability issue. We should be pushing for better student representation in honors classes. But everyone knows Earned Honors isn’t the same classroom experience,” says Allen. “My freshmen year I was getting such high marks in regular history, I switched to honors history second semester. The coursework was definitely harder and that’s what I wanted.”
Allen asked that Isthmus mention that his father isn’t an active parent in his life: “I hope it shines a light on how even single parent households are capable of academic and college success.”
“Yes, it was mostly white students in my honors classes. But I enjoyed those classes and learned a lot,” says Allen, “I didn't personally ever feel like I didn’t belong there but we could be doing more to make sure all students feel welcomed in whatever class they choose to take.”
