Honorable or not?

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Recently, ETHS has made a move to tackle diversity issues at their school. Evanston is an extremely diverse community with mixed races and income levels, but at ETHS certain classes have an unequal representation of black or white kids. ETHS reported that in honors classes, a class of 28 students will have 3 students who are not white. This leaves black and hispanic students, who are more likely at a lower socio-economic status, in lower-level classes without the guidance of many of the more experienced teachers. Evanston has responded by proposing to eliminate Honors classes all together, but continue offering AP levels.

ETHS hopes that by doing this, white students and black students will end up in the same intermediate-level classes and they will end up with more racially diverse and overall smarter classes because the former honor students will continue to excel. Unfortunately, I believe that if this plan is in fact followed through, it will be counter-productive for both white and black students. The students in the all white honors classes will have to deal with less focused and slower-paced classes which will in turn hurt their test scores and learning. The students in the lower level classes will no longer have an attainable goal to work their way up to AP classes. Instead they will either have to stay in a class too easy for them or make the huge and sometimes unattainable jump to an AP class.

Furthermore, if Honors classes are eliminated, many parents of honor students will put their children into private school. If ETHS loses many of their high-level students, their test scores and credibility as a school will fall dramatically. I think that the racial divide between Honors and intermediate courses is a huge problem, but the way ETHS is going about solving it is all wrong.

Race In Running

When we talked about race and running in class today, it held a particular significance to me because I am on the track and cross country team.I had heard the "fast twitch theory" before, the idea that African-Americans are faster sprinters because their fast-twitch muscles are more proficient than white peoples'. It was interesting to me that there seems to be no actual biological evidence that African-Americans are faster runners. My question now is...so why are they?

At the state track meet in May I saw a definite distinction between the skin color of people in the short distance events to people in the longer distance events. In fact, 5/5 of the top finishers in the 200m were black, as opposed to the 5/5 top finishers in the 3200m who where white. Is it possible that the expectations on the athletes play a part in what event they choose to run? Is an African-American girl who shows talent in both elite distance running and elite sprinting more likely to chose sprinting that's where she feels she belongs based on previous sprinting feats by black women? If this is true than that could mean that African-Americans aren't neccessarily better at sprinting, there are just more of them that focus on sprinting instead of disntence because they expect to be better at it and it is "cooler" for that "race" (race is loosely defined after our in-class discussion).