Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs | Hacker News Reader

Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs

eastbayexpress.com

27 pointsabsconditus12 comments

I live in Berkeley and have tried to puzzle out this particular issue a bit. Here are some things I've learned:

* The title is misleading. Science labs will still be offered at BHS only they will take up more hours of regular class room time (they same way they do in every other high school in California). What is slated to be cut here are science labs during "extra periods" outside of the usual schedule. Overall, this would mean less hours for teaching science (labs and classroom) but the hours available are still in line with what is available at other, fine performing California high schools.

* BHS has the highest "achievement gap" in the state, along racial and economic class lines. Roughly speaking, the Hispanic kids perform (on average) at about the achievement level goals. The White and Asian kids (on average) above the goals. African American kids and poor kids (on average) fall below the goals. This is the basic inequity that the principal is attempting to address.

* The racial and class divides at BHS mirror the city as a whole. Berkeley is comprised of extremes: quite a few quite poor and quite a few quite rich people. Many people probably think of themselves as being in "the middle" of that but, really, it's a very polarized economy. The economic class divide coincides heavily with racial lines (e.g., odds are a poor person is Black and a rich person White). The high achieving kids tend to be, well, very high achieving: lots of AP classes and other fancy attachments to their HS diploma. They tend to be college bound. A lot of them come from rich families. This is one source of the polarized politics around the proposed changes at BHS.

* Faculty at BHS are antagonistically factionalized. BHS is divided into semi-autonomous "sub-schools" (called "small schools"). Students opt-in to one of these. Each small school has its own curriculum and policies and teaching philosophy. Part of the politicization of this issue with the science labs appears to me to be some infighting among factions of faculty.

* Underperforming students do indeed appear to be under-served. One goal of redirecting funds here is to be able to afford to ensure that every single student at BHS has an academic advisor who monitors their performance and helps them become good students. Currently, students can coast through, achieving little, without anyone paying much attention.

* Money doesn't grow on trees. The opponents of this plan haven't suggested where else to find budget besides cutting the extra period science labs. BHS' per-student funding level is higher than state average but so are expenses around here - BHS ain't exactly flush, afaict.

* Its unclear any students will be harmed. One parent did tell me her struggling student benefited from these extra labs but I'm not so sure he would have benefited less given an academic adviser instead. Another parent complained to me that without the labs, it would be hard for his child to complete the requirements of several AP courses plus receive a "baccalaureate in international studies" which is offered by one of the small schools as a supplemental degree. (I found the latter parent's concerns understandable but hard to sympathize with.) Meanwhile, high achieving students can find plenty of opportunity at nearby University of California, several other colleges, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, etc.

* The principal might be an idiot in this matter. Several parents offered an argument against the plan that I thought was pretty good: The principal's proposal for how to spend the reclaimed budget is (as stated) too vague and lacks persuasive rationale. I won't be too surprised if not only does this plan go down in flames (labs not canceled after all) but, additionally, the guy loses his job. He pulled a few political parliamentary maneuvers to get the plan as far as he's gotten it and there is a lot of backlash now. (My take is that this is a shame because the impulse should be to refine and complete his plan rather than just lash out against it.)

* Opponents of the plan are playing pretty dirty with their rhetoric. One letter that went out to parents was saying (I paraphrase cynically here): "hey, you know global warming and swine flu? well, if we cancel these science labs there's nothing we can do about those things!"

* Metrics are not in sight. A comment by "riffer" in this thread offers the stereotypical "conservative" (I would say "common sense" in this case) complaint that teacher performance is off the table. It's even worse than that. The public debate around this issue utterly lacks any measured data about the performance of the courses slated for cancellation or the expected performance of the alternatives. In that sense, the entire question seems quite random - there's no good answer.

You have done a great job of laying out all the facts and points. I completely agree that the title is a little sensationalist. It doesn't seem like they are removing science from the curriculum completely, and indeed that would make no sense.

Thank you for clearing up that unbelievably vague article. "Eliminat[ing] science labs" could mean plenty of things.

Thanks dasht for the well-written analysis of the situation. This is what news stories ought to be, if you ask me.

Firing teachers for poor performance: not allowed

Firing teachers who offer the most to high potential students: politically correct

I grew up in a town right next to Berkeley, and I'm not surprised. Just disappointed.

Actually firing the teachers of high-potential students isn't just politically correct, it's economically advisable.

NCLB dictates that funding will be awarded based upon standardized testing performance. Because schools are rated not just on the score, but also on their ability to improve (regardless of their position), it's always advantageous for the administration to maximize test scores.

In this scenario, you have a small group of top performance students who are going to breeze through the state's dumbed-down tests, regardless of whether or not they participate in more advanced classes. So any money spent developing these students will not net you any additional NCLB score.

Whereas spending the money on struggling students provides the real possibility of raising your average score, thus guaranteeing more money- assuming you grow faster than other school's you're competing with.

Isn't competition great?

Public schools are, by design, redistributive. For that matter, the very bestest of the private schools are, by design (these days) redistributive. So, I don't think you can pin this one on misaligned government incentives to public schools - it's a deeply entrenched cultural value.

Personally, I think it's the right thing: rich or poor, the high-achieving students who breeze through are cheap and easy to educate. If the classroom isn't keeping them busy, it tends to be easy to find them extra-curricular opportunity. Meanwhile, many initially struggling students can be turned around and turned into huge cultural assets, education-wise. It's a good investment to try (in smart ways).

That said, the tenure system and lack of measurement of teacher performance is a huge problem. That's also true of both public and the best private schools.

"Personally, I think it's the right thing: rich or poor, the high-achieving students who breeze through are cheap and easy to educate. If the classroom isn't keeping them busy, it tends to be easy to find them extra-curricular opportunity. Meanwhile, many initially struggling students can be turned around and turned into huge cultural assets, education-wise. It's a good investment to try (in smart ways)."

You can't use cheap and extra-curricular activities together to form any reasonable conclusion. When the budget hammer falls the first thing thrown out are extra-curricular activities and the district will then point out how expensive they are to maintain. You toss out extracurricular like it has no structure or purpose. As if throwing some dice in the room is good enough activity. All of the leaques I participated in were highly structured, well-organized, and well-funded. And the teachers running these things were deeply invested.

The most brilliant and the most lacking are the most expensive students a school can have. I know this from a long time because my school was pushing for more gifted students, anyone that had a modicum of a functioning brain was tested. The state and fed kicked in extra money that was then diverted to other purposes: security, struggling students, ESOL.

"the tenure system and lack of measurement of teacher performance is a huge problem"

Tenure has been around for hundreds of years and no one has been able to explain why it's a bad idea. At the university level it makes sense. You devote yourself to years of work with no immediate payoff and you don't want that ruined by some bean counter. Unpopular ideas have to be protected the same as popular ones.

Tenure in highschool doesn't exist unless you can point to one that explicitly has it. This is not to confuse it with unions. There has been quantitative data of teacher performance available for years. The teacher knows it, the school knows it, hell the principal and vps also have access to it. The problem is these teachers have to be replaced. It's much cheaper to put pressure on a problematic teacher who knows the game after 10 years then train a fresh college grad who might stick it out for 1 year.

I've had 5 friends go into teaching after college. Only 1 is still doing it and she's only recently hit her stride (classroom control, curriculum, certification) after 4 years.

I compare this to when I was a student. Because it was hard to go from top 10% to top 1% I didn't get any special award. But some students got awards for 'improvement'. A lot of my colleagues thought the same thing. "WTF, this dumbass goes from failure to average and gets a plaque, while I've been busting my ass all year for an attaboy?"

I'm sure it seems stupid, but when you've been groomed for 12 years to attain achievements any achievement is seen as a positive.

It's probably not correct, but it's how I see NCLB. Being rewarded for being a failure 9/10 of the time.

"Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous."

What would be cool would be if all the high performing kids had to tutor the low performing kids. The nice thing about that solution is that it is both a) cheap and b) helps both parties, unlike this policy.

Unfortunately, the low performing kids might find that humiliating :/

Before we (OK, "they") go making changes, I'd like the school to ask the underperforming students what the school can do to help them improve. While I suspect a long list of wisecrack responses, it's still remotely possible the troubled students have a vague idea what really needs to be done.

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