Algebra and AP: No, Not For Everyone

Jay Mathews, the outspoken Washington Post writer and frequent advocate for increased early enrollment in algebra courses, apparently needs eyes in the back of his head this week because of the backpedaling he’s having to do on his previously-held assertions.

To Mathews’ considerable credit, though, he’s the first in line admitting his position was wrong, and I respect his integrity in doing so:

Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them — let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 — were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.

The problem with Mathews is that he doesn’t go far enough in examining his other assertions about increasing enrollment in other challenging classes, specifically Advanced Placement courses. Mathews has repeatedly asserted a position on AP enrollment that essentially amounts to “the more, the better,” arguing that all students would benefit from AP courses regardless of their previous preparation or ability. Many people — including me — would love it if Mathews were to apply his new realizations about algebra to his earlier assertions about AP and ask, “Say, am I wrong here, too?”

The More Child , a marvelous blog on giftedness and education, quotes Dorothy, a commenter on Mathews’ articles in the Washington Post on the issue of pushing kids into AP courses and increasing AP enrollment in general. Dorothy stated,

…I have been corresponding in email with Jay …Jay refused to budge. Said that as long as the AP exam is required, teachers *never* water down the curriculum. …Since it is a College Level Course then it must Be Real Hard And Rigorous! Told me flat out that Finn doesn’t know anything, as all he did was go to a focus group. Jay on the other hand, has been studying AP for 20 years all over the country and knows best.

Well, hey. I haven’t been studying AP for 20 years all over the country. I’ve just been teaching in my little corner over here, and not for 20 years, at that. Still, I may have some insights.

Here’s one: Jay is wrong.

Here’s why: Jay is right in asserting that the AP test drives the curriculum. However, what happens when you pack an AP class full of a substantial percentage of students who aren’t prepared to understand the material because they lack native talent, previous exposure and practice, or dedicated effort, teachers have little choice BUT to water down the curriculum.

I know AP English best, so let me talk about that a bit — my examples are going to be better than if I tried to pretend I actually knew anything about, say, AP Calculus. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you had a class in AP Literature and Composition. What most AP Lit teachers know very well is that the AP basically has only one main question, and it is this: What is the author’s point, and how does s/he use language to get us to see it?

What do you do, though, with a class who has a hard time comprehending the notion of “an author’s point”? What do you do when those students assert, “The point of Romeo and Juliet is to show love and suicide” (No, those are some of the topics of Romeo and Juliet, not the point of the work), or “The point of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is to show depression” (No, again, depression is an element in the work, but it is not the author’s judgment, opinion, or insight into human nature, all of which are what is meant by “the author’s point”)?

If you’re like most teachers, you teach and teachandteachandteach and explainexplainexplain what the author’s point is; you give example after example to illustrate the differences between theme and topic, between theme and sub-theme, between a small-scale insight-with-a-lowercase-i and large-scale INSIGHT-with-a-capital. You do this because, like most teachers, you want your students to succeed, and dangit, if they don’t understand this fundamental, foundational, crucial, elementary concept, the rest of the course just doesn’t matter. It’s like trying — well, it’s like trying to teach algebra to people who haven’t got a strong grasp of the fundamentals of math.

Too many students are “grossly misplaced” in AP courses of all kinds, and this gross misplacement happens for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the College Board has begun utzing schools to “eliminate barriers to AP.” In the past, if you wanted AP you had to, you know, be qualified for it. In most cases, you had to have As in your previous English courses, or be recommended by your teacher, or maybe even take and pass a pre-test to demonstrate that you were prepared for the difficulty of the material. No longer.

The College Board casts its actions as a Politically Correct Crusade, positioning themselves as breaking down those MEAN, MEAN, discriminatory walls erected against otherwise-talented and academically successful students who would all get “5″s if only their intellectually elitist, latté-sipping MEAN-ASS teachers would Just Let Them IN.

Um. The fact that the College Board makes eighty bucks every time a student takes an AP test would, of course, have nothing to do with this push to increase AP enrollment at all. Not at all. Nopeitty nope-nope.

Jay, I’ve got news for you: It’s not that simple. See, I’m guessing that most AP teachers, latté-sipping or no, don’t give a rat’s caboose about a student’s race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. If those teachers are anything like the ones I’ve met and talked with and read about and dealt with in a variety of ways both personal and professional, what they care about the most is whether or not the student can do the goddamned work. The student doesn’t even have to know a whole heck of a lot on the first day of class: s/he just has to be willing to put in the hours, days, and weeks that are required to catch up. The problem is that most often, they’re not. Too many of them think that succeeding in AP is just a matter of believing you can do it if you want to.

See, it’s what I call the Sarah Palin problem. When McCain asked her to be on his ticket, Palin stated that she “didn’t blink” when the job of being second-in-command to the leader of the most powerful nation in the world:

“I didn’t hesitate, no,…I answered him yes…because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

What Palin is discovering is that “confidence” isn’t enough. Attitude is no substitute for experience and education and ability. As the delightful mockery of Palin and Clinton on SNL accurately and brilliantly suggests, just because you “want something” — even if you want it REALLY, REALLY BADLY, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.

Bottom line, the worst disservice being committed here is not just to the students who are completely overwhelmed with material that they don’t like, don’t understand, and won’t study. When too many administrators of those teachers pressure them into “helping students to succeed” *coughinflatinggradescough* and students with As in class end up with 1s or 2s on the test, this is hardly helpful.

And of course, pushing for AP enrollment, even when students are “grossly unqualified” has NOTHING to do with some school administrators wanting to score high on the Challenge Index, a ranking of high schools based on the simple calculus of the number of graduating seniors divided by number of AP tests taken…a report invented by — you guessed it! — Jay Mathews.

Nope. Nopitty-nope-nope. Not a thing.

Needless to say, though the Challenge Index is theoretically intended to suggest that the schools scoring highest on the Index are more academically demanding and intellectually rigorous than others scoring lower, the Mathews ranking doesn’t waste its time looking into such irrelevancies as the number of students who actually PASSED the AP with grades of “3″ or better. Theoretically, anyway, a school could have 100% of its seniors take various AP exams and fail them all, and end up waaaaay high on Mathews’ Index.

Good idea.

Packing AP courses with unqualified, unwilling students hurts more than those students alone. It’s also a huge disservice to the students with genuine commitment and talent. AP has frequently been touted as the reason it’s not important to have gifted education at the high school level — the idea being that AP is so demanding that it in itself provides gifted education.

Again, it’s not that simple. When a significant number of students in a class do not understand fundamental concepts, this is not gifted education because the teacher cannot proceed beyond the very bottom of the Bloom’s taxonomic pyramid: there’s just no point in building a house on a foundation of quicksand. When the teacher of the AP course has to de-select materials, questions, or passages because s/he knows those items will simply be beyond the capacity of many of her or his students to understand, this is not gifted education either. When the teacher has to explain and explain a fundamental concept over and over, AP isn’t gifted education.

Actually, the word would be…”remedial.”

Thanks, Jay.

Note: I just found another teacher’s reflections on this same issue at The New Intellectual Pursuit.  DEFINITELY worth reading!

~ by adsoofmelk on September 28, 2008.