Don’t Know Much About His-to-ry…

An interesting post at the Education Gadfly begins, “There are sound ways to encourage more students to enroll in AP classes. But the tack of Seattle’s Roosevelt High School, which will require all its sophomores to take at least one AP course next year, is not one of them.” 

No kidding.

For the last several years, the College Board has been putting considerable pressure on programs and teachers to increase the diversity of the students taking AP classes.  The College Board has come out and stated that they want to eliminate any kind of entrance criteria for taking AP classes, which means that anything like one’s previous grades in a similar class, or a teacher’s recommendation, or a writing sample, or anything at all that might be indicative of a student’s willingness or ability to take the course and benefit by it (and benefit others in it) should be eliminated as prejudicial.

 I’d love to say it’s commendable to try to open the program to more students, and God knows, AP classes should look like something a little more American than a closed-membership golf club.  I’d love to say that that is the main goal here, but cynically enough, I suspect it’s a lot more about the fact that the College Board makes eighty bucks every time a student takes a test.  Even if that student only makes a “1″ (the lowest score on the AP’s 1-5 scale), the College Board still ends up with their dough.  More students taking the test…well, you don’t have to be in AP Calc. to do the math on that one.

 I even wish I could give some kind of props to Roosevelt High School and say, “Well, they’re trying to challenge their students.”  I wish I could say that, but then I remember that Newsweek’s simplistic formula for determining “America’s Top Public High Schools” – the number of AP courses taken, divided by the number of graduating seniors…whether those students take the tests or not, whether they get 1s or 5s. According to Newsweek…well, again, you don’t have to be in AP Calc. to figure out that making that Top 100 list might be a shiny dream in the mind of the Roosevelt High School principal, Brian Vance.

Hey, why should I complain, right?  AP gets its eighty bucks a head, Brian makes Newsweek, and Roosevelt gets to brag about its “rigorous academic program.”

 There’s only one reason: the students.

Oh, yeah!  Them.

The problem is, AP only really works when two factors are in place: student motivation and student ability.  Ideally, it works best when both those factors are in place, but Brian’s odd plan will remove both from the vast majority of the 430-or-so students who are going to, now, be required to take an AP course as sophomores — in itself an odd decision, given that most AP courses are geared toward juniors and seniors.

AP requires a great deal of homework, particularly in content-heavy courses like AP History, otherwise known as “If-this-is-Tuesday-it-must-be-Progressivism.”  Mastering DBQs, the notoriously difficult AP History free-response essay in which students are given 5 to 7 documents pertaining to a specific historical topic and are required to write what amounts to an on-the-spot documented research paper in 40 minutes, give or take reading time, is no laughing matter.  Neither is the very similar AP synthesis question, a new DBQ-like feature of the AP Language and Composition exam.  For AP Lang, students routinely answer questions having to do with analyzing the author’s use of rhetorical strategies to convey her or his point — a subject which involves knowing the difference between, say, anadiplosis and anaphora, and why the author would choose one over the other and what effect it has.

Not exactly “identify the verb in the following sentence,” is it?

Teachers have traditionally relied on AP students’ willingness to do the heavy coursework and to exert their usually-talented selves in mastering the material.  Not so at Roosevelt, though, where every sophomore will be taking AP whether they want to or not, whether they can read or not.  Luckily, Roosevelt’s students are good at passing state tests, but their average SAT scores — 558 verbal, 572 math, 549 writing — are just that: just above average.  This suggests to me that their sophmores’ AP scores aren’t going to be stellar either.

What’s worse is that the GPAs for many of those same sophomores will tank.  Faced with the considerable difficulty of material that many of them have not chosen to learn, faced with the considerable difficulty of material for which many of them may be ill-prepared, some of these kids’ grades will take a dive bomb for the sake of fulfilling Brian’s dream of being in Newsweek. 

Bottom line: you can’t force excellence.  You can’t raise the bar and expect people are magically going to be able to jump over it.  Real training for the AP doesn’t begin in freshman year: it begins at least in middle school, maybe even as far back as first grade. 

The desire to raise the academic bar is commendable, and honestly, given that NCLB has been all about teaching the minimal number of students the minimal amount of information for the past few years, the idea that Roosevelt is trying to raise the stakes has many worthy features, but the fact is, without that prior preparation, it’ll be like sending a team of Little Leaguers to the World Series. 

Oh, well.  See you in Newsweek, Roosevelt.  Hope it was worth it.

~ by adsoofmelk on March 15, 2008.