Some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent schools have ditched honors classes in the name of equity — but it’s a terrible idea
Some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent schools have ditched honors classes in the name of equity — but it’s a terrible idea
By Rikki Schlott
May 13, 2025
Palo Alto schools are doing away with Honors courses in the latest assault on excellence.
Starting in September, freshmen will no longer have the option of taking a more rigorous Honors Biology class. Instead, the district will have one “foundational” course.
The Palo Alto Unified School District voted in January to nix the advanced class after an hours-long debate with dozens of concerned members of the public in attendance. Honors English has already been sidelined.
Proponents argue that “de-laning” — removing different “lanes” for students based on achievement — will promote equity and encourage all kids to pursue science throughout their high school career.
One Biology teacher argued during the meeting, “We know that laning can lead to issues around students’ beliefs in themselves.”
But opponents — including one 8th grader who showed up to the vote in protest — argue it’s an assault on meritocracy.
“Please don’t hold students such as myself back from these wonderful opportunities to challenge ourselves and grow as individuals,” she told the board.
Nonetheless, the resolution, which has been under consideration since 2018, still passed with a narrow 3-to-2 margin.
Since when does everyone have to be the same? And why does one kid’s excellence threaten another’s “belief” in themselves? Must we all be handicapped in the name of equity?
Palo Alto dad Nan Zhong is furious about it. He says the school district is “approaching the achievement gap in the wrong way.”
“I think the move is really misguided, and it’s very polarizing,” Zhong, a software engineering manager at Google, told The Post. “The parents who are very involved in their kids’ education and really want to prepare the kids for success are very upset.”
His two sons, a 16-year-old sophomore at Gunn High School and a 19-year-old recent graduate, both took Honors Biology and, Zhong said, greatly benefited from the accelerated courses which were “stepping stones to AP courses” later in high school.
“The school of thought seems to be that we need to have equity and reduce students’ mental burden, so, therefore, let’s make the curriculum easier, and everybody can get an A,” he said.
The Post contacted the school district for comment but did not receive an answer.
The move has drawn widespread scrutiny, including from local Democratic congressman Ro Khanna.
“It is absurd that [the] Palo Alto School district just voted to remove honors biology for all students and already removed honors English. They call it de-laning. I call it an assault on excellence. I took many honors classes at Council Rock High in PA,” he tweeted on Monday.
Another X user joked, “Only in Palo Alto, where the school board’s been breathing rarefied air too long, do you get ‘de-laning’—an idea so open-minded, their brains fell out.”
They’re right. The district should be more interested in producing excellent alumni than in making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt because they couldn’t cut it in Honors Biology.
Notable graduates of public high schools in the district include 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman, and Charles Brenner who is considered the creator of forensic mathematics.
Surely they’re not a product of a system that emphasized equity over excellence.
This is part of a much larger shift. Neighboring Fremont Unified School District and Sequoia Union High School Districts have also eliminated Honors courses in an effort to de-lane.
“It’s just part of the larger trend in California of watering down curriculum in public schools in the name of equity,” Zhong said. “But I really don’t think that’s progress because if we don’t teach kids anything and just give them an A, well, they got equity — but they get no knowledge and no skills to succeed.”
Since the great reckoning of 2020, there’s been an effort at schools across the country to promote equity, whether for the sake of racial justice or student self-esteem.
High schools abandoning Honors courses are waging the same war on excellence as specialized schools dumping entrance exams and colleges dropping standardized testing requirements.
Rather than concentrate efforts on lifting up underperforming students, just the opposite tends to occur. Champions of equity seem determined to bash down the kids who excel in the supposed interest of the greater good.
In the end, everyone is worse off, and nobody is special. How is that progress?
As Zhong put it: “The way to eliminate the achievement gap is not to take away the measure of the outcome. They’re basically saying if you don’t measure, then we don’t have any problem.”
This BBC article explains why the U.S. needs help from India’s technologically superior workforce.
https://x.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1877176172921929779
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27775327
Why do millions of Indians defecate in the open?
By Shannti Dinnoo
June 17, 2014
It’s early morning and local commuters are queuing up for tickets at the Kirti Nagar railway station in the Indian capital, Delhi.
Along the tracks, another crowd is gathering – each person on his own, separated by a modest distance. They are among the 48% of Indians who do not have access to proper sanitation.
Coming from a slum close-by, they squat among the few trees and bushes along the railway tracks and defecate in the open.
To many, this is a daily morning ritual despite the hazards of contracting diseases such as diarrhoea and hepatitis.
It can be even more hazardous for women since each time a woman uses the outdoors to relieve herself, she faces a danger of sexual assault.
Recently two teenage girls from the state of Uttar Pradesh were gang-raped and found hanging from a tree after they left their village home to go to the toilet. Their house, like hundreds of millions of others in the country, did not have any facilities.
‘No privacy’
A new World Health Organisation (WHO) report says more than half a billion people in India still “continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes or in open water bodies, with no dignity or privacy”.
Access to sanitation is a challenge that India’s politicians want to tackle – both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised to put an end to open defecation in their 2014 general election manifestos.
During his campaign, Narendra Modi, BJP’s newly-elected prime minister, promised: “Toilets first, temples later”.
And former rural development minister Jairam Ramesh of the Congress party had stressed that “practicing good hygiene is as important as performing good puja” (act of worship in Hinduism).
India’s government offers cash incentives to subsidise construction of toilets. It has also initiated hygiene and sanitation awareness campaigns, such as the “No Toilet, No Bride” slogan launched in the state of Haryana in 2005, urging brides to reject a groom if he did not have a lavatory at home.
The Gates Foundation too has offered grants to create latrines that are not connected to water, sewer or electricity and to improve the treatment of human waste.
‘Lack of focus’
The exhibits at a recent “toilet fair” organised by the Foundation in Delhi included a lavatory with a photovoltaic roof-top that powers a reactor breaking down excrements into fertiliser, and another one which came equipped with an automatic sterilisation system and a generator turning the moisture into water.
Apart from poverty and lack of lavatories, one of the reasons often cited to explain open defecation in India is the ingrained cultural norm making the practice socially accepted in some parts of the society.
“Just building toilets is not going to solve the problem, because open defecation is a practice acquired from the time you learn how to walk. When you grow up in an environment where everyone does it, even if later in life you have access to proper sanitation, you will revert back to it,” says Sue Coates, chief of Wash (water, sanitation and hygiene) at Unicef.
India will be free of open defecation only when “every Indian household, every village, every part of Indian society will accept the need to use toilets and commit to do so”, she says.
Professor at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology Meera Mehta says the strategies implemented so far may not have the expected impact because of a “lack of focus”.
“With the right policies and political attention, India can be free from open defecation within 10 years.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 