ETHS Board Passes New Honors Biology System
The proposal passed 5-2.
Honors
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Thursday, December 1, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Next Year's ETHS Freshmen Will Have to Earn Their Honors Credit
The school board unanimously approved the superintendent's proposal to re-write the freshman Humanities curriculum and give all students the chance to earn honors credit no matter their EXPLORE scores.
Next fall, all Evanston Township High School freshmen, save a few who score below the 40th percentile on the EXPLORE exam, will take the same Humanities courses, thanks to the school board's unanimous approval of Superintendent Eric Witherspoon's earned-honors-credit model. "This not simply about curriculum," Witherspoon said in his final proposal statement to the board Monday night. "This is a restructure of the freshman experience to lessen the harmful practice of sorting and labeling students before they even enter ETHS. … This not a secret plot to some day eliminate honors and AP classes at ETHS." The decision came after a month of school board presentations, public debate and a petition of 442 signatures urging the board to reject the…
Friday, December 10, 2010
Beyond The Bickering: A Deeper Look At ETHS’ Curriculum Proposal
On Monday the District 202 school board votes on the proposal to equalize next year’s Freshman Humanities curriculum. Will public comments sway the board to hold off?
"Apartheid." "Eugenics." "Bright flight." Conversation at Evanston Township High School has been heated these past few weeks. It's not the students – 1,245 of whom are white, 916 black, 479 Hispanic, and 248 Asian, American Indian, Hawaiian or multiracial – who have been using impassioned language to describe the education they're receiving, but their parents. ETHS's proposal to eliminate the honors track in freshman Humanities next year (and in biology in 2012) and to expose the majority of freshmen to the same instruction and opportunity to earn honors credit has proponents comparing this school to South Africa. Opponents have expressed worry that filling a classroom of students who score from the 40th to the 99th percentiles on the …
Clif Brown
4:20 pm on Friday, December 10, 2010
"The district has looked at more than 40 articles and books on detracking, "rigorous" curriculum, intelligence as a malleable quality, differentiated instruction, and successful detracking at high schools such as South Side High School in Rockville Centre, N.Y." Where the district hasn't looked is at District 65. Dr. Witherspoon cut off a question about District 65, refusing to answer it and … more ›
Mindy Wallis
9:00 am on Wednesday, December 15, 2010
"petition of 442 signatures urging the board to reject the proposal." Actually the petition only asked the Board to wait one year on one aspect of the proposal, the elimination of the straight honors track. The full text of the petition states: We, the undersigned parents and community members, urge the D202 School Board not to make any decisions related to the proposal to eliminate the honors-… more ›