This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19: Joanne Jacobs: The AP juggernaut http://bit.ly/8MaIho Full http://bit.ly/6veOaN...

I found a great resource for info on all this, http://www.collegeplus.org/ and they are very home school family friendly

Everyone should take AP classes.

It’s just too bad everyone shouldn’t have to learn how to read in elementary school. That would make everything a whole lot easier.

As some of you may know, I work for Prince George’s County public schools in the state of Maryland. At present, at my high school, Bowie High in Bowie Maryland, we are on track for placing every single student in the school in at least one AP class before they graduate. That’s right! Every single student in an AP class.

This year we have seen students with Ds in their English classes from the previous school year being placed in AP English. The school administration, under the orders of the main administration and the central office, have started placing students of every type in AP classes that the students had not even requested. Why would we do such a thing?

If you look at my high school on the Newsweek website, you will see that my high school is in the top 50 of the best high schools in the nation. You want to know how we got there? Why, by simply looking at the criteria selected by Newsweek on how to get in their top 50 list. One of the criteria that Newsweek defines a good school by is, how many students as a percentage of the student body are in AP classes.

That’s right! The more students, as a percentage of the student body that a school has enrolled in at least one AP class per year is what Newsweek considers to be a measure of a good high school. The fact that an overwhelming majority of all of our AP students failed to break a 3 score on the AP test seems to matter not to Newsweek in measuring the quality of the high school.

The school system is not being run for the good of the student. The school system is being run for the good of the administration and the politicians who are part of the entire system that create students who know nothing when they go to college, can’t do anything when they graduate from high school, and who usually drop out of college after the first semester never to return.

How do we solve this problem?

In a typical urban or predominantly low income school, there’s no pressure. The schools just call classes AP (there are numerous stories of kids from low income schools who have AP Calculus on their resume and 350 SAT Math scores and never covered anything more than algebra) and use it to give their hardest working kids a transcript that allows state universities to pretend they are treating all kids similarly, regardless of SES. In other words, it’s a massive fraud that allows barely literate kids to be selected ahead of the kids in suburban schools who don’t take AP courses but whose regular coursework is four or five grade levels ahead of the low income/urban school kids. It’s that awareness that forces suburban parents to push their kids into AP programs even if they’d rather now–or, if they don’t, they end up with kids who can’t get into a UC despite solid skills well ahead of the bottom 20% of UC students who are accepted because of fraud.

There really aren’t too many cases of good suburban schools with decent AP courses having trouble with kids who can’t read in these courses. The kids who can’t read are taking AP courses, just in different schools.

AP is the new “college bound” course for many schools where there is an enormous difference in ability levels -and no other way for the schools to group by ability.