West Cook News

Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF) school leaders want top freshman students to be prohibited from taking more advanced classes in history, foreign languages or English, according to a memo sent to the school's Board of Education on Tuesday.

OPRF curriculum chief Laurie Fiorenza authored the memo calling for a ban on so-called "honors" classes, or placing students in classes by performance or ability. She says the practice is racist and causes black and hispanic students to score lower on standardized tests. 

"(This ban) will enable the Oak Park and River Forest High School community to address the adverse underlying beliefs that have led to barriers hindering equal access to the high-level rigorous curriculum, particularly for our (black and hispanic) students," Fiorenza's memo said.

Fiorenza and division heads Amy Hill (History), Claudia Sahagun (Foreign Languages), Brian Conant (English) and Matt Kirkpatrick (Science) are asking the Board to expand the honors ban to more departments at their Oct. 28 meeting.

The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) reports that at OPRF, 82 percent of white students and 66 percent of Asian students passed the 2019 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), versus just 56 percent of hispanics and 23 percent of blacks.

Freshman honors classes in science at OPRF have already been banned, effective this school year.

White and black student performance falls in Evanston

OPRF parents can look to one example of how an honors ban has worked in practice in the Chicagoland area.

Evanston Township High School District instituted an English and history honors ban in 2010, moving from five levels of classes to just one.

ISBE reports that in 2017, 87 percent of white Evanston High School sophomores and 27 percent of blacks passed the SAT, versus 76 percent of whites and 23 percent of blacks in 2019.

But supporters of Evanston's ban say it is working as planned, making the gap between white and black student performance smaller (60 points vs. 53 points).

"Although as parents we must care about our own children, we must not care only about our own children," wrote Oak Park "racial and environmental justice" blogger Jim Schwartz. "White middle-class parents must be willing to tolerate some risk in making changes that will benefit people of color who are the primary recipients of harm in the current system."

Self-described school "reformers" from the left, like Schwartz, have been pushing to end honors classes since the early 1990s.

An exhaustive Fordham Institute study of honors bans in Massachusetts, where they first started in 1991, concluded that schools implementing them saw worse student performance after they did.

"The association is clear. More (honors classes), more high-performing kids and fewer failures. Fewer (honors classes), fewer high-performing kids and more failures," the report said.

Fiorenza, whose official title is "Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning," earned $172,636 in total compensation in 2020, including 30 paid sick and vacation days, according to district data. The total doesn't include her taxpayer-funded pension contribution.

The Oak Park and River Forest Board of Education includes Board President Sara Spivy, Board Secretary Ralph Martire and members Fred Arkin, Tom Cofsky, Gina Harris, Kebreab Henry and Mary Anne Mohanraj.

Martire, who runs a teachers union-funded think tank, and Harris have been outspoken supporters of an honors ban, which they believe furthers the district's pursuit of "equity," or the Marxist principle of ensuring equality of student outcomes.

Minutes from a 2019 Board discussion on the topic described Martire as expressing "confidence in pursuing this" and calling an honors ban "a promising path for moving the whole school forward from the achievement and performance standpoint."

In the same meeting, Harris said "she appreciated the evolution and the journey" to an honors ban and that she "had not heard or read anything about academic rigor being lessened" where they had been instituted.