Your anecdote actually proves the point of the article - if there is already a high concentration of delinquent behavior, kids introduced into that environment are likely to behave poorly themselves. The question is whether it works the other way: would you have a better chance of reforming the behavior of an individual problem student if you placed him with the honors class?

There is some free software I've been wanting to run that only works under windows... this might finally give me a reason to install Parallels on my Macbook.