In a 3-2 vote at Tuesday’s Palo Alto Unified School Board meeting, the board decided to merge the freshman biology and biology honors courses starting next school year. School board members Shounak Dharap, Shana Segal and Allison Kamhi voted in favor of merging, while Josh Salcman and Rowena Chiu voted against the shift. Student board representatives Aishwarya Balasubramaniam and Samantha Fan voted against the motion.
“This [merge] is a really great representation of serving and celebrating others, teacher collaboration and trusting teachers to do what’s best for our students,” said Danaé Reynolds, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction at PAUSD, at the board meeting.
Every present PAUSD teacher — including Advanced Placement biology teachers — favored merging the two freshman biology lanes, Reynolds said.
Elizabeth Brimhall, a Palo Alto High biology honors teacher, said that the new course will provide a strong foundation for students to build on in future classes and will expand access to excellent science education for all students. Aspects of this foundation include critical reading, critical thinking and analytical skills, she said.
To address discrepancies within students’ proficiency levels, the new course would offer extension opportunities for students who have achieved proficiency and offer extra guidance for students who need more support, according to Brimhall. In addition, she said that the new course would be more equitable than offering regular and honors-level biology courses.
“Our honors classes look very different from our college prep level classes,” she said in regard to student diversity within regular versus honors classrooms. “We want our classes at all levels to represent the diversities of our schools.”
One Greene Middle School eighth-grader, Katie, argued against the merged biology course because of her desire to take advanced courses, she said. She said that she is currently enrolled in geometry honors and has found that challenging courses are a better fit for her.
“I want to take a class that challenges me and moves faster than a regular class, and I was really looking forward to taking biology honors [at Palo Alto High],” she said during public comment.
Laurie Pennington, a physics teacher at Gunn High, argued that opponents of the course merge ignore the equitable opportunities it provides to all students.
“In the end, people want to make sure that their child stands out from the rest,” Pennington said. “The only way to make some children stand out from others is to ensure that others don’t have the same opportunities as their child to excel and grow.”
3 thoughts on “PAUSD board votes to remove biology honors, freshmen to take unified biology course”
This is a disappointing decision that makes it harder to trust the teachers and the district to focus on academic excellence. Equity is important, but lowering standards and taking away advanced opportunities doesn’t help anyone. Challenging classes like biology honors are important for students who thrive in a faster-paced environment, and removing them takes away a chance for those students to grow. Equity should mean giving every student what they need to succeed, not lowering the bar for everyone. This feels like a step in the wrong direction.
We went all the way through PAUSD and to provide “differentiated instruction” for students of different levels of ability they either send kids off with work sheets that may or may not get feedback. In class, some kids are lost and others mentally check out because they’re not learning at a rate that they could. In this case the plan is to have kids who want the honors experience (i.e. taking on personally relevant projects or learning at a higher level) are allowed to do this without credit or any effect on their grade. Let’s see if kids take them up on this. I won’t hold my breath. At one point a teacher said how tragic it was when a kid down-laned from honors. One of the board reps said she down-laned and it was not a big deal and she learned she did not want to do honors. Students have different priorities. There is an assumption that this will encourage more kids to pursue honors chemistry. Did they even look at how many students pursue honors chemistry now to see whether this goes up? I predict they won’t look at any metrics of success because the goal is to dumb down education to promote “equity” rather than give students the choice.
This is the opposite of equity. Equity is not the same as equality, hence the different word. Equity means that each person gets what they need, which may be very different from what others need. A small person needs a small bicycle, while a large person needs a large one. Giving them the same bicycle will be equal, but at least one person would be unable to ride.
Same here, by giving everyone the same biology course we’re setting up some students to a boring course or others to hardship, or both. Not equitable at all.