Advanced Placement

I write about Advanced Placement fairly often. Here's a link to something I wrote for Education Week earlier this year and a bit of an update. I'll keep trying to make this more sophisticated with links and pictures and videos and stuff.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/03/05/26mattimore.h27.html?qs=mattimore
It’s pretty certain Aesop was not an economist. Had he been, his fable about the goose that laid the golden eggs would have taken a different turn. First, as the goose produced more and more eggs, market demand would have decreased the eggs’ value. Second, the farmer and his wife would have been unlikely to slaughter the goose to get at what they thought was gold inside for fear of flooding the market.

Often though, companies behave the same way as the farmer and his wife did in Aesop’s story. They get greedy and think short-term rather than what may be in their best long-term interest. In the education business, the golden goose parallel has been the story of the rise of the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.

The AP program is a series of 37 college-level courses which students take in high school and for which they may receive college credit.

The nationally administered AP exam is scored on a scale of 1-5 with 3 being considered a passing score. Some colleges will grant students credit for an exam grade of 3, but increasingly more selective universities require a 4 or 5.

The AP program grows at a rate of approximately ten percent per year. It was originally developed in 1955 to give elite high school students an opportunity to take a couple of college courses.

The Post reported this past week that the Denver Public School District plans to improve school achievement by expanding the number of AP courses offered and removing prerequisites to taking the classes.

That sounds fine, except in a companion article to the piece about planned AP expansion, the Post also reported some abysmal results of tests taken by freshmen in the District. For example, less than half a percent of freshmen taking an introductory algebra test scored an “A” grade while over two thirds of the test takers received “F”’s. Eighty-seven percent of those tested scored below a “C” on the earth science test and only 9% received an “A” or a “B” in American Literature.

So instead of improving the delivery of high school services, the District is going to be investing heavily in providing college-level courses to students.

The College Board encourages the nonsensical policy of AP expansion in school districts in which majorities of students can’t handle high school work by misleading the public as to the success of AP.

For the fourth year in a row, the College Board has reported that higher percentages of students succeeded on AP exams last year than in the preceding year. That assertion distorts the reality.

Going back to at least 2000, the percentage of students passing AP exams, based on the numbers of students taking the exams, has declined. Beginning in 2005, the College Board began reporting passing percentages based upon the total class of graduating seniors in each state, whether they had taken an AP exam or not.

Nationally, the percentage of students passing an AP exam in 2007 (based on those who took an exam) declined from 2006 by over one percent.

Minority non-Asian numbers are particularly discouraging. Education Week reported that "the percentage of passing exams taken by Hispanic students slipped 5.5 percentage points over the past four years, to 43 percent in 2007. The percentages of passing scores among the group the College Board refers to 'African-American or black'
slipped by nearly 4 points, to just 25 percent."

Trevor Packer the executive director of the AP program has been forthright about the program's growing pains, telling Education Week last year that there is a "dark underbelly" to AP expansion because "there have been entire schools or districts where almost no students are scoring 3 or higher."

Before we invest more dollars in expanding the AP program, we must provide the pre-AP infrastructure in our middle schools to insure that students are prepared to meet the challenges of AP. Otherwise, we can expect that our AP failure rates will continue to climb and a golden program will lose its sheen.