School districts move away from honors classes in favor of AP courses (to push minorities into AP's)

Not long ago, honors courses were considered a hallmark of student achievement, a designation that impressed colleges and made parents beam.

Now, those courses are vanishing from public schools nationwide as administrators move toward a more inclusive curriculum designed to encourage underrepresented minority students to join their high-achieving peers in college-level Advanced Placement classes.

Fairfax County’s public schools are at the forefront of the movement, nudging would-be honors students toward more-rigorous AP courses, despite criticism from some parents that eliminating honors will have the reverse effect and lead some students to choose less-demanding “standard education” classes instead of AP.

Honors courses are generally taught from the same lesson plan as regular classes but at a faster pace and in greater depth. An AP course contains altogether more-challenging material — charting a path that coheres to national standards, which are heavily endorsed by the Fairfax school system.

This fall, Fairfax will discontinue honors-level courses in subjects where an AP class is offered, drawing the ire of parents who want to restore what they call an academic middle ground. They have formed a group called Restore Honors Courses.

Prince William County took an even bolder stance about 10 years ago, doing away with the honors track. There has been resistance to that in other school systems — including Montgomery’s and Loudoun’s, where the honors option has been scaled back.

Considerable opposition from Fairfax parents has prompted the school board to review its decision to do away with high school honors courses that for years served as an alternative to basic and AP courses.

“We’ve found that traditionally underrepresented minorities do not access the most-rigorous track when three tracks are offered. But when two tracks are offered, they do,” said Peter Noonan, Fairfax’s assistant superintendent for instructional services.

"That's one of the dirty little secrets."

Our sons are pretty cynical about the whole college testing process by now. They've been subjected to an endless process of standardized testing, accompanied by a seemingly endless stream of requests from us for checks to pay for this test, that test, this prep book and that . . .

Both of them opted to forgo the SAT prep course offered by the school, which came at a significant savings over the privately offered ones. They decided that they could prepare well enough without it. We agreed that they could take the SAT test in the fall of Junior year, which gave them time enough to re-group if they did poorly without the prep class. It worked for our older son, and in the fall we'll see about his brother.

What our sons tell us is that many of the hyper competitive kids (mostly Asians) in their school take the SAT's 5 or 6 times until they get scores they can live with. They also take SAT subject tests one at a time, rather than take two on a single day. It has something to do with being able to drop the scores they don't like without dropping the results of the entire day of testing. I don't recall now whether it's a case of not turning in the test booklet or whether they choose not to report the day's results. It's all a bit over the top for me.

There's a huge industry sucking our bank accounts dry over this. Between local school taxes, universities, testing services, and the sundry coaching, advising and preparatory goods and services, it's quite a racket.

I think your son made a wise decision about the college calculus and physics classes. In my field, the AP course is something of a joke mainly because there are so few high school teachers who really know the subject. And it rarely hurts to sit through an important subject again, even if much of it is somewhat familiar.

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