At a Seattle high school, all sophomores will take an AP class, whether they’re prepared to succeed or not.
It’s a great idea for exposing students to all the rigorous thinking of an AP course,” (Chief Academic Officer Carla) Santorno said. “It’s a pretty bold move. Instead of just providing kids with the background and then just giving them an opportunity, this is an opportunity to just kind of force the issue.”
Education Gadfly wonders about sophomores who can’t read well.
And why make everyone take the same AP class? The school is dropping AP European History, now a popular choice for sophomores, and requiring all sophomores to take AP Human Geography, which is new to the school. Do they think geography requires less background knowledge than history? This is supposed to be a college-level course.
Some AP teachers worry the program is expanding too rapidly, drawing in unprepared students who have no chance of passing the end-of-year test. That pressures teachers to water down the curriculum.
Here is another consideration. If an AP teacher meets course requirements and maintains the rigor of the course, some students who originally made As and Bs in College Prep or Standard courses may not achieve such grades in AP. Although it’s honorable to “expose” students to AP, some parents (and even most students) aren’t always happy with the grades on their report cards. (And then there’s the GPA factor for college admission, too!)
A Chief Academic Officer? I guess I can add that to my list of ponderous edu-crat titles. It’ll take its place next to “Chief Pedagogical Officer” and “Assistant Superintendent in Charge of Safe, Clean and Healthy Schools”
Here in NY we have a unique issue involving the AP. NY students take a Regents exam at the end of the year, a state-wide competency test in each subject. Traditionally, you needed to take all of your major subjects in a “regents” class and pass the test to get a Regents HS diploma. If you didn’t take all of the tests, or didn’t pass them all, you could still graduate, but with a lesser “General diploma”.
The problem was that since no other state knew what a Regents diploma was anyway, a lot of college-bound kids opted out of the Regents programs, and cherry-picked their courses. To raise the level of competency, NY state did away with non-regents diplomas. Everybody has to take the regent’s classes.
And the problem with that is most schools had a three-tier system in each course(tracking if you will)– AP for the most advanced student; Regents, for the regular-to-good student; and non-regents for the weakest students and the disciplinary problems.
When the non-regents classes were terminated, the Regents classes became more remedial–and the better students started to flock to the AP classes, in the hopes they would actually learn something.
Our AP classes swelled, including with students who have no business taking AP, and who, in fact, weren’t taking the AP test–just the course. Since they knew they weren’t going to take the test, their approach was different than kids taking the course “for real”.
Then came Newsweek with that stupid high school ratings system based on the number of AP tests taken–not passed.
And so, predictably, school districts in NY are now requiring the kids who escaped the regent’s classes into the AP classes to take the test. They don’t need to pass the test–in fact, since the results come after the school year ends, the results are not included in the kid’s grades. But if they don’t sit, they don’t get credit for the course.
So now will come a flood of unprepared kids taking the AP–and a host of 1’s and 2’s.
Helloooooooo
AP=Advanced Placement
How can it be advanced placement if everyone is taking it?
It’s bad enough that we attempt to educate everyone as if they were going to college, now we’re going to force everyone to take honors courses?
More nonsense from educators that will damage schools and students. Does anyone expect anything else from the Blob?
Beyond stupid. The majority of the students won’t be prepared for a college course, which is what an AP course is. (And why should they be? There’s no shame in not being ready for college when you’re 15.)
So either most of the class will be hopelessly lost in the class, or the course will be watered down to the level of the average high school sophomore. The College Board is cracking down on schools that falsely label their classes “AP” when the classes aren’t in fact advanced. If I were the College Board, I wouldn’t let this school call the class an AP class.
I feel badly for the kids that should be taking the AP classes. What a bummer to find your once challenging classes dumbed down to accomodate the less able.
AP courses were designed to enable the top high school students to earn college credit by scoring well on the AP tests. Pursuant to that goal, AP courses were typically second-level courses preceeded by honors-level courses in the same subject. This was true at my older childrens’ school. In order to take an AP science, students had to have done well in the corresponding honors course and an honors course in world history was a prerequisite for AP Euro etc. Naturally, AP students not only took the exam, but most expected (and received) at least a 4 (of a possible 5). All 4 of my children and most of their AP classmates had enough AP credits to start college as sophomores, bypassing the usual freshman survey courses.
Thanks to a relatively recent egalitarian push, helped by Jay Matthews’ Challenge Index, schools were pushed to remove the honors prerequesites and to allow anyone into the AP courses. Predictably, many students were unprepared for real AP work; creating potential or actual unacceptable drop/failure rates, declines in percentage taking/passing AP tests and watered-down courses.
I understand encouraging students to challenge themselves with tough courses, but that was the purpose of honors courses. In my experience, a course can either challenge the average student or prepare the top students to receive college credit, but not both. Of course, any student may take AP tests, whether or not he has taken the course at all. My youngest passed both the AP English Language and AP World Geography without the classwork.
Let’s stop pretending that all students are equally capable or equally diligent. The top students deserve to have their needs met as much as do any others, and they typically become the highly-productive people of whom society has great need.
Do they think geography requires less background knowledge than history? This is supposed to be a college-level course.
I’ve never taken a single AP course that requires any “background knowledge” at all (except mathematical APs).
Give me a student who is an effective reader and serious student, a skilled wordsmith, and wields a formidable vocabulary…and I’ll put him in any AP course offered. Everything you need to know can be learned in the course.
Trouble is, schools aren’t getting this core education done, making this AP thing a terrible idea.
Is Jay Matthews acting as a journalist on this point? Or is he really a social reformer who is using his access to the media to push through his programs? When he responds to readers’ letters, or interviews others about the AP program, he’s not speaking from a position of impartiality. Rather the opposite, as a matter of fact.
That which critics of the Newsweek system prophesied has come to pass: high schools are gaming the ratings by forcing as many students as possible to take APs. While it may expand the horizons of unprepared high school students, a debatable point in my book, it is ruinous for the AP program.
This could be solved by considering a school’s average score on the AP exams, so that merely marching warm bodies through the system wouldn’t outweigh everything else.
Addendum – all science AP courses at my older childrens’ school met for 2 periods each day and the AP physics was calculus-based (concurrent enrollment in AP calculus BC required). Enrollment was capped at 36 per class – determined by availability of only 18 lab stations- and the large class was not a problem. Homogeneous group of highly dedicated students equalled high achievement and no discipline problems. Those courses were more rigorous than offerred at many, if not most, colleges and their graduates typically went on to attend highly selective universities.
To vital core: You are right. Even many top-rated schools in highly affluent areas have only a small number of such students and most other schools have only a handful. The usual school in a disadvantaged area has none, with perhaps a handful at half that , level. Small rural schools are also unlikely to have many such students.
Vital: What about AP Computer Science or AP Physics? Or what about AP Music Theory, which requires the student to sight-sing, and to take music dictation (listen to a piece of music and notate it)? I don’t think just any effective reader would succeed in one of those courses.
Vital: Or what about AP Studio Art, or any of the languages? I’m an effective reader with a good vocabulary, but I guarantee you that I couldn’t succeed in an AP Chinese Language and Culture or AP Latin: Vergil class.
Fang, …what about AP Studio Art…
Sorry, I assumed anyone reading my post would follow common sense. I’m talking about the 99% of normal AP everyone takes.
For AP physics, no background is needed. The first physics course I’m planning on for my kids is AP. The difference between them and other students, though, is that they will know their mathematics up past Calculus like the back of their hand, have independent study habits, and very used to solving mathematical problems with no help.
High school science courses are simply a waste of time. Fun, sure, but nothing worthwhile is gained. What the heck business does anyone have learning physics without knowing calculus well first? Physics without calculus is just playing games.
Hard truth: mathematics is the irreplaceable language of science, and yet very, very few students graduate from high school fluent in it. So many students are tricked by their teachers into believing they know “science” only to become confused and dejected when encountering real mathematical science. And the kid from China or India who merely knows the basic math very well eats their lunch. I’ve seen it over and over.
Jay Mathews and I had a pretty far-ranging debate this week about what’s happening with AP. Here’s the link to our discussion on the Post website.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/10/AR2008031000401.html
Most of the AP classes I’ve looked at lately in California have been significantly less rigorous than the college-track classes I had in Missouri some fifty years ago.
All this kind of thing guarantees is that their AP classes will be watered down to meaninglessness, following the decline that we’ve seen in the rest of public schooling.
We’ve got to get over the Lake Woebegone mindset; we’re throwing away the kids at the top and the bottom, and spending an incredible amount of resources in the process.
Frankly, I have a strong feeling that this is all about two things:
1. The College Board’s desire to make money (eighty bucks per test)
2. The principal’s desire to make Newsweek’s list of America’s Top Public High Schools.
Too bad if the students’ grades tank or they end up feeling and being woefully unprepared.
I’d also like to add to Tony Iovino’s remark above about more AP takers scoring 1s and 2s. Many teachers of AP have their professional reputations staked on how well their AP kids perform. With no criteria to get into the course, more teachers’ average percentage of passing test-takers will obviously decline — but of course, that looks as if the *teacher* is to blame.
I remember from my school years that having just a few students in the class who weren’t able to keep up not only made things much more difficult for the teacher, but ensured that the better students weren’t learning nearly as much as they should have. What happens when the majority of the class is underqualified?
A poster above noted that in his/her past experience, students took AP courses after doing well in honors courses on the same topic. That is exactly what happens at my son’s college prep school. I don’t think the prereq is required, but that is indeed how it shakes out. Everyone knows that the AP teachers are extraordinarily demanding, and students’ GPAs will tank if they aren’t ready for the AP course.
Another poster mentioned that AP teachers’ reputations rest on how their students do on the test, which is the objective measure of success. This is very much the case at my son’s school. The AP US History teacher’s students earn an average 4.4 on the test. This is a great source of deserved pride for him. It tells us parents, who are paying big bucks for the school, that it may be worth it.
We dropped AP classes at our high school in favor of International Baccalaureate. Students can decide if they want to go certificate or diploma level. The top students rise quickly, the others fall out over the 4 years. Finding the money to pay for the IB tests is getting hard, though, as we are an inner city school located in the highest concentration of poverty in the nation.
When we did have AP classes, all students could sign up, and many did because they got extra grade points, but all students did not do well. And, as someone has already mentioned, the teacher had to dumb down the curriculum to make it work for the less successful student.
Vital Core,
You may well be right that for some high school physics courses, “Fun, sure, but nothing worthwhile is gained.” It is easy to run a high school physics course so that it is little more than labs and memorization–and the memorization doesn’t last past June. Of course, that latter is true of many courses.
But it certainly is possible to learn a good deal of physics without calculus. Anyone who actually understands Paul Hewitt’s Conceptual Physics book is ahead of 95–no, probably 99–per cent of the country’s college graduates.
And algebra is a powerful tool. One of the things I (yes, a high school physics teacher) do early on is have my students make a graph of velocity against time in a simple situation like, “Joe drives for 2 hours at 60 miles per hour.” They get a nice rectangle and they know that the area of a rectangle is length times width. So I have them calculate it. And they’re kind of flumoxed that the answer they get is 120 miles. Every other area problem they’ve done gives them a unit of some length squared.
I tell them they have done something wonderful. The unit is right. By finding the area between the velocity line and the time axis, they have found the distance that Joe goes in that period of time. We then do somewhat more complicated “trips” and it all works. I often end with a plug for calculus. With the math we have, we can’t do really complicated trips, but you can with calculus
There are lots of things that are easier to “do” with calculus but you often don’t need calculus to understand the idea. For someone fluent in calculus, it is meaningful to say that momentum is the time integral of force. But with the right build-up and examples, it is meaningful to the less fluent to say that “momentum is accumulated force.”
Which nicely leads to the idea that additional force is required to change momentum (harkening back to Newton’s Second Law) and that the amount of momentum change will depend on how much force is exerted and for how long (the impulse-momentum theorem).
Roger Sweeny, it certainly is possible to learn a good deal of physics without calculus.
Sure. I absolutely agree. I merely think it’s a waste of the student’s time that would be so much better spent learning calculus.
IOW, if we take two identical high school students, one focusing on a complete mastery of mathematics while the other the plays at learning physics, I think any university prof can tell you who will come out on top when they go head-to-head in advanced physics, or even on the physics AP exam.
I don’t think Americans have any idea what’s coming down the educational turnpike in science. As the world flattens, we will be facing the very top IQ set chosen from a pool of 2 billion Chinese and Indians. Our population of 0.3 billion is a rounding error for them. I promise you, the top rung of these kids (the ones who get to come here) know their math like our kids know their sitcoms. I’ve spoken with science department heads who say they wouldn’t accept any American graduate students if it was strictly merit based. We simply need to raise the bar, if only to prepare our brightest high school students who are used to sitting on top of the curve for the competition they will be facing. This means serious math in high school, and physics can certainly wait for it.
For someone who’s going to become a physics grad student, it might well be best to get “a complete mastery of mathematics” and then to jump into physics.
Alas, the proportion of students who graduate high school with anything near a mastery of math is infinitesimal. No doubt this proportion could be increased by telling the best students, “You’re going to have to double up on math before you can take physics.”
The few, the proud, the dedicated would then be allowed to take physics in 12th grade. No one else could touch it until they had shown math mastery in college. Which would mean very few people. Period.
I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
Roger Sweeny, …very few people [would take physics]. Period. I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
Fair enough.
I just don’t think high school phyiscs is important. Why? For 99% of the kids who won’t take it again in college, it’s a waste of their valuable time. In one ear and out the other. I would bet some serious cash that if we tested students who took high school physics only once ten years ago, we could prove it’s a waste of time and money. In other words, if high school physics was a product for sale on the free market, I don’t think many would buy. Especially at current rates, which would be about $1600 per year ($10k per year for six high school classes).
As for the students who will take it in college, I just think that learning stuff in the right order is better. Much of non-calculus physics has to be dumbed-down, and thus must be relearned later using new methods, and this is very confusing, not to mention inefficient.
I would bet some serious cash that if we tested students who took high school physics only once ten years ago, we could prove it’s a waste of time and money.
We certainly could prove that most remembered very little of it. Unfortunately, we could also prove that about almost any high school (or college) course.
I’m not exactly sure what that means. Certainly, for most people, schooling is not about acquiring subject matter knowledge. It is about screening, credentialing, socializing, staying off the streets, learning to “play well with others.”
Roger Sweeny, schooling is not about acquiring subject matter knowledge. It is about screening, credentialing, socializing, staying off the streets, learning to “play well with others.â€
Wow. Everyone has differing opinions about school, but our visions of schooling simply have zero overlap. For me, it’s about education.
And I disagree with you that this is a minority opinion among parents, and that for most people, schooling is not about acquiring subject matter knowledge. Try selling this theory to parents looking for a private school. No sale.
Personally, I want my kids to get their socialization in the family and on the streets and workplace. Creds? God bless the SAT and AP. I seriously shudder to think of my children going to school for the express purpose of credentials or socialization. That bar is so low I can’t limbo under it.
My statement was not meant as an opinion of what schooling should be, still less about what education should be. It was a description of what schooling actually is.
Why do I say it’s not about “acquiring subject matter knowledge?” It is conventional wisdom among teachers that, “by August, they’ve forgotten most of what they learned.” One can question whether the word “learn” is used correctly but it is undeniable that if students had to retake all their tests a year later, they would score much, much lower.
This fact is the elephant in the room. Most everyone in the business knows it’s true but just about everybody avoids thinking about it.
Things like the National Assessment of Educational Progress show astounding ignorance among students. Many states now have subject matter tests that students must pass to graduate. Take a look at the tests and the passing scores and be amazed at how easy they should be to pass. Then consider the fact that a large percentage of students fail and that many schools have extensive “review” before the tests. The amount of “subject matter knowledge acquisition” is pretty low.
Parents think their children are acquiring large amounts of knowledge. They are mostly wrong. Some kids do. But mostly not.
And often parents have an ambivalent attitude. “I’ve never had to use the quadratic formula since tenth grade algebra. Why should my kid have to know it to pass the high school graduation exam?” What parents want their kids to have is knowledge that will be useful, that will make their children “successful,” which generally translates to “give them a wide choice of ways to make a living that are interesting and well-paying.” They don’t know what that knowledge is and neither do schools.
So what do schools do? They screen. People who do well in school are people who can defer gratification, work toward a goal, see a task through to completion, etc. If high school was about “acquisition of subject matter knowledge,” GEDs would be worth more than a high school diploma, because GEDs certify that a person has demonstrated recently that he or she can correctly answer questions about all the major things that are supposed to be learned in high school. But GEDs are worth less. They show that the recipient couldn’t make it through the normal high school process, would probably be a risky choice to offer a job to.
Of course, since screening is largely a ranking process, there is a constant push for credential inflation. Employers who once required a high school diploma now require a college diploma for the same job. Jobs that used to require a college diploma now require an MBA. Not because the jobs are really more difficult but because the old cut-off no longer cuts off enough people; the old diploma requirement no longer ensures that you are getting the “top” people.
Roger Sweeny, I agree.