Advanced Academics Are Good

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Sometimes I have a plan to write about something and then another more prominent writer with an actual audience and platform writes about a similar topic a few days before I plan to hit publish. This is going to be one of those posts. I’ve been trying to lay out a case for rebuilding public trust in public education. It’s, like, just my opinion, man. But I think I’m on to something and hope I can persuade a few people who can one day persuade a few more, and maybe some like minds with actual influence will make some positive change some day. Also, I write for my own mental wellbeing.

Anyway, today’s post is about the need for schools to offer advanced academics on flexible pathways so that as many kids as possible can access them. That framing, access, is important because I think the recent use of equity framings has pushed parents away and, when reflected in policy, led to a decrease in kids taking advanced courses. While everyone doing less advanced stuff is technically equitable, I don’t think anyone who is seriously interested in getting disadvantaged kids more opportunities thinks that banning them from advanced courses is the way to go. But, because of the principle of scholastic alchemy, equity efforts in some spaces became focused on preventing kids from taking advanced classes because of how those spaces were segregated by race and wealth.

Instead of me writing about it, though, I’ll send you (once again) to Kelsey Piper who, I think, is making the right point about all of this. She’s writing about tracking and de-tracking, that is, the practice of making a pathway for students to take advanced coursework year after year, usually based around mathematics courses and kids taking algebra in 7th or 8th grade. The big problem, as opponents rightly point out, was that this kind of strict pathway essentially hoarded advanced math for wealthy white and Asian kids.

Importantly, for my purposes, public perceptions of these kinds of programs were negative.

But, the outcomes of this program and others like it went the other way.

So so so much of what I had planned to write about is precisely what Piper has written above. I don’t think it’s really all that necessary for me to repeat it in detail so I’ll make a few comments instead.

First off, I want to once again remind everyone that Gifted and Talented programs are not meant as training programs for academically successful students who receive accelerated or advanced coursework. Yes, in many cases that’s how school districts have organized these programs, but the origin and purpose of G&T was for intelligent but disengaged misfits for whom school was not a place of success. I think we would do good to separate out advanced classes as their own thing rather than make them part and parcel of participating in gifted programming.

Second, comprehensive schooling should be comprehensive. That means a kid in a comprehensive high school, or even headed there from middle school, should have access to a full range of courses even if they’re not technically part of her “pathway” or track or whatever. A college-bound kid should be allowed to take a career and technical education course in automotive repair or criminal justice. A kid headed to trade school should be allowed to take a college-prep class or two if that’s what she wants.

Toward that end, I want to zoom in on something that Piper notes about studies that appear to show detracking works but may actually show something else entirely.

I think her instinct here is really good and we should consider both points here. If you do indeed have advanced courses but make them easier to enroll in, you’re not providing evidence that those courses should be eliminated. Moreover, if broadening enrollment shows positive benefits, that’s even more of a case to try and enroll more kids in those classes. The way forward here is to offer advanced classes but make enrollment in the less dependent on strict adherence to “tracks” that begin, in some cases, when children are four years old. Yes, some courses will always require prerequisites but we’re mostly talking about algebra here. It’s something that most kids can learn at some point and making that determination based off one referral in elementary school or one test taken at age four is ridiculous.

Let’s put a few things together here to make my main point today.

• Parents “want a say” in their kids education and when they don’t “have a say” they will consider removing their kids from public schools, including through the use of the new voucher programs being rolled out in many states. But, what’s hard for policymakers is that it’s not always clear what parents mean when they “want a say”. That could mean anything from micromanaging the texts and concepts a kid encounters to just wanting them to be happy in school settings. There are ambiguities here.

• When you look at the reporting on parents who have removed their kids from traditional public schools, you don’t find much attention paid to challenging academics. When we look at high quality polling about what parents consider important, advanced academics aren’t there. Note that CTE is career and technical education.

  

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• BUT, when you ask the public specifically about getting rid of tracking in public schools, they dislike it. It is, in this polling, the sixth least popular thing associated with Democrats! I get that these two polls aren’t directly comparable and the way Welcome Pac does their issue polling is contested, but I think it’s worth recognizing that they are telling us something important about who gets associated with which policies.

  

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  I will add that even this polling conflates tracking with testing into a track (many forms of tracking are not test based and come from teacher recommendations) and with gifted programs (do I need to link my objections again?). This is the only k-12 issues where democrats are substantially underperforming, so they have decent support for other things k-12 in this polling. Also, I would argue that vouchers are defacto detracking. Nobody is keeping track of what voucher kids learn and we do not insist on good outcomes there. We throw our hands up and say “that’s what their parents want” even though it is taxpayer dollars being spent. Somehow conservatives are immunized from this whole discussion.

• So, we can safely assume a few things. The general public and parents have different expectations and understanding of schools. Parents right now seem to care more that their kids are in safe, supportive, environments with adequate staffing and flexible learning options (we see examples of preparation for the trades and AI literacy there) with more control given to state and local governments. The public, meanwhile, is more focused on the need for advanced classes and is skeptical of DEI interventions. They do support early childhood programs and free school lunches (so long as taxes aren’t raised to pay for it).

This gives us a clear way forward for public schools. Offer advanced classes alongside plenty of other options, such as opportunities to learn about new technologies or taking classes aimed at preparation for the trades. Make enrollment in these classes more flexible so parents see their kids as having lots of options (because they do!) and giving them a sense that they can better help guide their children’s education. While I personally don’t want to minimize inclusive practices, I think we need to refocus on what inclusion means in the post-pandemic era. Schools should talk about giving students access to lots of advanced coursework and making it clear that kids not taking advanced classes have relevant and engaging options, too. We can also take some pressure off the advanced learners because maybe the kid who’s good at science and is taking advanced math and science courses doesn’t want or need the advanced ELA or history class. Right now, strict tracking setups often bundle a bunch of advanced classes together, increasing workloads and stress for kids in subjects that aren’t of much interest.

The public needs to see public schools as not wasting kids time or holding back kids who want or need challenging coursework, but we should balance that with parents’ needs for kids to have schools that are safe and supportive in non-academic ways. If schools were also civically engaging, a la my post Wolverines, we might see the public understand that schools do more than just train kids for college and career. All of this requires troubling the idea that standardization is the way forward. It is because of standardization that tracks became ossified. Standardization minimized the non-academic functions of school and turned learning into test-prep. If we want kids reading whole books or working on challenging engineering problems, then we need to build systems of accountability and evaluation around those things instead of 200-word skill-based reading passages and quickest-solution math achievement.

Thanks for reading!