San Diego's Largest High School Cuts Honors Classes for 'Equity'

The principal of San Diego’s largest high school has been cutting honors classes due to “equity” concerns and to avoid the “stigma” attached to non-honors courses, leading to outrage among parents in the diverse community the high school serves.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported Sunday that Patrick Henry High School principal Michelle Irwin “has been cutting several honors, advanced and gifted education courses” without the “knowledge or input” of the school district’s parents.

The Union-Tribune noted:

Irwin cut the courses for equity reasons, according to an email she wrote to parents. She told parents she wanted to move away from “stratifying” classes and remove the stigma from non-honors courses. She has also cited racial disparities in honors course enrollment — a problem that is mirrored nationwide.

The controversy has rattled Patrick Henry, a racially diverse school in the middle-class neighborhood of San Carlos that is also San Diego’s largest high school, with more than 2,500 students.

Hundreds of outraged parents have formed a private Facebook group devoted to fighting the school’s new “equity” policy.

The idea of cutting advanced classes for “equity” is familiar in California, where Berkeley High School considered cutting science lab classes more than a decade ago in an attempt to close the gap in achievement between black and white students.

A proposal in San Francisco to eliminate merit-based admissions to Lowell High School to reduce the disproportionate number of Asian-American students helped provoke the recall of three local school board members earlier this year.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.