Examiner column for February 17.
Offering high school students college courses as a way to
prepare them for the rigors of higher level thinking and writing, seems like a
no-brainer. Yet Advanced Placement has always fought an uphill battle to gain
acceptance in high schools and in the press. I’ve seen it in the three Fairfax
high schools I’ve taught in, and I saw it last week in The New York Times. Why
is such a successful program the target of so much negativity?
When I started teaching high school students after ten years of college teaching, I realized that these students--only one year younger than most of the college students I’d taught--were capable of far more than was expected of them. At my first school, most students had no one in their families who had gone to college, yet they read Chaucer in Middle English and Jane Austen. They were “game” as long as my approach was laid-back and emphasized that reading was fun.
My second school—America’s “Best”, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—was newly created, and thought Advanced Placement was not for all students (even though they scored 90th percentile or higher.) There were only a few AP English sections, and when I encouraged my “Regular English 12” students to take the AP test, tongues were wagging. “She had as many students taking the test as I did—and she wasn’t even teaching AP!” (That has changed, and all seniors at TJ take the AP test now.)
At
Oakton High School, I saw the English AP program burgeon from 31 test takers
when I arrived, to over 200 when I left. Most of the principals supported
increasing AP offerings, and opening courses to any student. Still, it was an
uphill battle, with many teachers claiming that AP “wasn’t what it used to be”
before the school allowed “regular” students to enroll.
The
negativity was always a function of pettiness and jealousy, I figured, so I
didn’t worry about it. But last Thursday The New York Times had an article
about the annual AP Report to the Nation. Headline: “EXPANSION OF A.P. TESTS
ALSO BRINGS MORE FAILURES.” That had not been my experience in Fairfax County,
so I was interested in the degree of “failure.”
In 2001 1 million AP exams were taken with a pass rate of 43%. In 2009, 2.3 million AP exams were taken with a pass rate of 39%. This is a 230% increase in numbers with a 4% increase in failure. The math: 430,000 students passed in 2001, and 897,000 students passed in 2009. If your child was one of the extra 467,000 whose scores were 3 or higher last year, you would not be looking at the 4% extra “failure” rate.
It’s hard to accuse the media of being petty and jealous, so I can’t explain such a misleading headline. (Maybe The Times was looking for a “hook.”) But I know there are hundreds of thousands of students who benefit from AP courses and AP exams—and I would include among them the “failures” who earn 2s. I had many of them over the years, and they still came back from college to tell me that my AP class prepared them the way no “regular” course ever did.
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