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What to do about those science classes at Berkeley High School ? where the classes that don't require science labs are full of black and Latino students...

... and it's mainly white students who get the advantage of all the money spent on all those great labs.

Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs -- decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% -- and using that money to fund "equity" programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state....

"There's a big fear of taking away from high-end achievers," said Linda Gonzalez, co-chair of the school governance council, which crafted the controversial proposal. But "why are we having science classes with two or three labs when there are kids in science classes with no labs?" wondered Gonzalez, a parent who supports the shift....

"This became a race issue, because just about everything that happens in Berkeley is fundamentally viewed through that lens," said [student Aaron] Glimme, who acknowledged that "there's a very clear difference by race as to who shows up to the lab classes."

It seems terrible to pit the hard-working, high-achieving students against the struggling students. You might think all the students are making their choices and getting what they've earned, but consider:

[Teacher Philip] Halpern said. "A public school like Berkeley High has an equal obligation to students who have struggled. We shouldn't be continuing to allocate resources to students who have had them all along."

As Halpern notes, "Berkeley High is the only high school in town. You get the professors' kids, the dot-commers' kids and the kids of the working class."

Full post as published by Althouse on January 24, 2010 (boomark / email).