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Cash incentives boost AP pass rate

October 4, 2011 By

More students take Advanced Placement classes and pass the exam when teachers and students are offered cash incentives, reports the New York Times.

At South High Community School, a mostly low-income school in Worcester, Massachusetts, eight times as many students take Joe Nystrom’s AP Statistics classes. The pass rate has climbed from 50 percent to 70 percent.

South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.

They were helped by the National Math and Science Initiative, a nonprofit network that provided laboratory equipment and special training for teachers and organized afternoon tutoring and Saturday sessions. It also paid $100 each to students who scored a 3 or above on the A.P. exam — and to their teachers, who can also earn additional rewards. Because 43 of his students passed the exam this year, far above his target, Mr. Nystrom will add a $7,300 check to his $72,000 salary.

Kristopher Santana, son of a customer service rep, earned a perfect 5 on the AP Statistics exam after atttending 18 hours of Saturday classes organized by the initiative, and Nystrom’s twice-weekly, after-school tutoring sessions. The $100 was “a great extra,” he says.

This year, 308 schools in six states are participating in the program.

 Brian Leonard, who teaches AP calculus and statistics at Lake Hamilton High School in Arkansas, earned a$12,500 bonus for 65 students who passed exams. Three years ago, the high school had only nine AP math students, all the children of educated professionals.  Now students from a range of backgrounds are taking AP math — and passing the exam.

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College in 3? Few choose fast track

June 22, 2011 By

The three-year bachelor’s degree isn’t catching on, despite soaring college costs and high school graduates with lots of AP credits, reports  the Washington Post.

“A lot of students are interested in it,” said Dave McFadden, executive vice president of Manchester College. “A smaller number of students sign up for it, and an even smaller number finish it.”

Completing in three requires students to pick a major immediately, pass up irrelevant electives, extracurriculars and junior year abroad and study when others are partying. Students say they’d rather enjoy the college experience then get into the job market a year early with less debt, the Post reports.

Motivated students with lots of AP credits can complete a bachelor’s degree in three years without signing up for a special program. They just do it. Some stay for four years and add a master’s degree. But these are excellent students who know exactly where they’re going.

CNN Money charts the growth in tuition vs. income. Four (or five or six) years of college is a luxury item. Costs are much higher for those who don’t live at home.

As portrayed on the left axis, median income has hovered around $33,000 since 1988. Meanwhile, college tuition and fees -- portrayed on the right axis -- have more than doubled.

As portrayed on the left axis, median income has hovered around $33,000 since 1988. Meanwhile, college tuition and fees — portrayed on the right axis — have more than doubled.

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Colleges question dual enrollees' readiness

June 20, 2011 By

Many more high school students are earning college credits through dual-enrollment programs, but some colleges question whether they’re truly doing college-level work. More colleges also are refusing to give credit to students who’ve passed AP exams.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Fewer California community college students are transferring to the California State system, while more are choosing private and out-of-state colleges and universities. That’s much more expensive, but not if students factor in the time it will take to get the courses they need and complete a degree.

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Study: Best charters don’t get most dollars

June 6, 2011 By

California’s best charter schools don’t get the most philanthropic dollars, concludes a study by Cato’s Andrew Coulson.

American Indian Public Charters‘ students score more than four standard deviations above the norm on the challenging California Standards Test, based on Coulson’s measure of effect size, yet the schools rank 21st in donor funding.

Oakland Charter Academies rank second in performance and 27th in funding, Wilder’s Foundation is third in achievement and 39th in funding and Rocketship Education is fourth in achievment and 10th in funding. All outperform Whitney High and Lowell High, district-run schools that select students based on high test scores, according to Coulson’s effect-size analysis.

Coulson also looked at the number of black and Hispanic students passing AP exams, excluding foreign languages:  “The correlations between charter networks’ AP performance and their grant funding are negative, though negligible in magnitude.”

Aspire Public Schools is the number one recipient of charter-school philanthropy in the state. It’s been around for a long time: Founder Don Shalvey, a former district superintendent, started the first charter school in the state. But Aspire ranks only 23rd among the state’s charters in student performance.

Philanthropists are replicating the charter schools with well-connected leaders, not necessarily those with the highest achievement, the study concludes.

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Automatically AP

June 3, 2011 By

All Federal Way students in grades 6-12 who meet Washington’s state standards are automatically enrolled in accelerated classes, including demanding Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge classes, reports the Huffington Post.

Some 80 percent of the district’s students pass state exams, which suggests it’s not a high bar. Only 30 percent were signing up for advanced programs, which include pre-AP and pre-IB courses for middle-school students.

Enrollment in advanced courses increased by 70 percent this year.  The most demanding classes no longer are primarily white and Asian-American.

Students can opt out of advanced classes with parental permission.  Michael Scuderi, father of a senior at Thomas Jefferson High, which offers IB, says many students aren’t prepared.

“We’ve heard stories of kids that have dropped out of the program, and they’re crushed,” said Scuderi. “Students weren’t told ahead of time everything they were getting themselves into.”

Of 274 11th graders at Thomas Jefferson High automatically enrolled in IB, 43 have dropped at least one course. However,  94 percent of students in advanced classes are passing with a C or better, the district says. Results from AP, IB and Cambridge exams aren’t known yet.

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Why not honors courses for all?

June 2, 2011 By

Why not honors courses for all? asks WashPost columnist Jay Mathews.

High-scoring Fairfax County schools, which offer regular, honors and AP or International Baccalaureate classes in 11th and 12th grade plan to eliminate honors classes if AP or IB is available. Parents are protesting. They want an honors option — faster moving, more in depth but not college level — for their children.

Mathews suggests eliminating the regular track: Everyone would take honors or AP classes. He makes what’s now an old argument:

The qualities that make you ready for college—good reading comprehension, clear and persuasive writing, math through at least Algebra II, presentation and time management skills—are the same needed to get a good job or trade school slot upon high school graduation.

Detracking is a national trend, he notes.

When teachers “drag” average students into AP or IB classes, “the results are almost always good,” Mathews asserts.

What would happen if you added regular students to honors classes? Jack Esformes of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria mixed seven AP students with 21 regular students in each of the five government course sections he taught each year. Nothing was dumbed down for the AP students. The regular students received less homework, but once they discovered they were often as clever in class as the alleged smart kids, some of them switched to AP. Many of them told me they liked the challenge of being taught at such a high level.

Is Esformes an average teacher? Or a very good one in a school where the regular students aren’t way behind the AP students?

I went to an untracked elementary and middle school. Reading during class saved me from terminal boredom. Then we hit high school: Then there were three tracks in math, three in science, five in English. I loved it. Sophomore year, I dropped down to Level 2 geometry to avoid taking two Level 1 math classes at once, which was the only alternative. I got a lot of reading done in geometry class.

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Advanced mis-Placement

April 27, 2011 By

“What the hell am I doing in AP?” asked Veronica, a  Haitian immigrant who’d earned a D in the regular 11th-grade English class.

To boost the number of minority students in AP, Boston’s English High assigned unwilling and unprepared students to AP classes based on their “potential,” not their demonstrated abilities, writes Junia Yearwood, a retired English teacher, in the Boston Globe.

Veronica and many of her classmates asked for transfers to easier classes. They were denied.

Consequently, I was forced to continue teaching my 12th grade AP students material they should have learned long before: the eight parts of speech, basic sentence structure, and the correct conjugation of regular and irregular verbs. When Maureen’s essay on an AP sample test included ’’have tooken’’ for ’’have taken,’’ and when Grace interrupted my explanation of a periodic sentence with the question, ’’What is a clause?’’ and when all the other students admitted they were just as puzzled as Grace, my crash course in English grammar became necessary and urgent.

“Underperforming” English High could boast that its AP enrollment was second only to the city’s exam schools.  But many of her AP English students ended up in remedial reading and writing classes in college.

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‘Click-click’ credits raise graduation rates

April 7, 2011 By

K-12 schools are adding — and sometimes requiring — online classes, reports the New York Times.  Failing students try to “recover” credits online; successful students take electives and Advanced Placement classes that don’t generate enough interest to justify a class. But the quality of online learning is suspect, especially for weak students.

Memphis City Schools now requires all students to take at least one course to graduate, starting with this year’s sophomores. School officials say “they want to give students skills they will need in college, where online courses are increasingly common, and in the 21st-century workplace,” the Times reports.

But it is also true that Memphis is spending only $164 for each student in an online course.

. . . “It’s a cheap education, not because it benefits the students,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the teachers’ union in Miami, where 7,000 high school students were assigned to study online in computer labs this year because there were not enough teachers to comply with state class-size caps.

Idaho will give a laptop to every high school student and require four or more online courses. Critics complain the state will replace teachers with technology.

Chicago and New York City are piloting online learning programs, which include both credit recovery and advanced classes for high school students, as well as “personalized after-school computer drills in math and English for elementary students.”

Nationwide, an estimated 1.03 million students at the K-12 level took an online course in 2007-8, up 47 percent from two years earlier, according to the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online education. About 200,000 students attend online schools full time, often charter schools that appeal to home-schooling families, according to another report.

There’s little research on the effectiveness of online courses for K-12 students, reports the U.S. Education Department.

Even online advocates are “dubious” about online courses that let students who’ve failed a regular class “recover” the credits, the Times reports. These “click-click credits” are used to boost graduation rates.

Sheffield High in Memphis, once a “dropout factory” with a graduation rate below 60 percent, now hopes to graduate 86 percent of the class of 2011. Online classes have helped. The district buys software for the Florida Virtual School, then pays its own teachers extra to work 10 hours a week with 150 online students.

The Times watches Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course.

. . . he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Asked about social Darwinism, the 18-year-old student did a Google search, copied a Wikipedia entry and e-mailed it to the teacher.

Online classes aren’t always money savers, writes Sarah Butrymowicz on HechingerEd. In particular, online credit-recovery classes don’t work without “some sort of teacher presence, whether virtual or physical.”

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The can’t-fail school

January 22, 2011 By

New York City’s top-ranked school is under investigation for cooking the books, reports the New York Times. Theater Arts Production Company School, a middle and high school located in a low-income Bronx neighborhood,  graduated 94 percent of seniors, more than 30 points above the citywide average. The school earned a near-perfect score in “student progress,” based partly on course credits earned by students.  The school’s no-failure policy requires teachers to pass all students who attend class, regardless of their performance; no more than 5 percent of students can get D’s.

In practice, some teachers said, even students who missed most of the school days earned credits. They also said students were promoted with over 100 absences a year; the principal, rather than a teacher, granted class credits needed for graduation; and credit was awarded for classes the school does not even offer.

The school’s former Advanced Placement calculus teacher said he was pressured to pass students who didn’t deserve it.

Last year, every student passed the class even though each received a 1 — the lowest score — on the Advanced Placement test, in part because they had not taken precalculus, he said. Only one had passed the Math B Regents, a minimal standard.

Even some students complained to the Times about the no-failure policy.

Some said that it sometimes hurt their motivation to know that a classmate would pass even if he did not come to class. One said that his current average was a 30 — but that he could bring it up to a 95 with a few days of work — and that teachers sometimes handed out examples of student work that he copied from.

“You would have to be an epic failure to fail at this school,” said Deja Sawyers, a 10th grader. When students do not do their work, “there’s no consequences,” she said, adding that she did not get homework.

Another student, Luisa Cruz, said, “Everybody always passes; it’s really rare to fail.”

“It makes no sense,” she said. “You’ve got to learn from your mistakes.”

The college acceptance rate for graduates is 100 percent, but students’ SAT scores are low and many end up in remedial classes in college.

College acceptance is meaningless: It includes students who go to open-admissions or not-very-selective colleges, take a few remedial classes and drop out.  Sending graduates to college to retake eighth-grade English and math is nothing to brag about.

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Rethinking AP

January 14, 2011 By

Advanced Placement is being redesigned to focus less on factual knowledge and more on teaching students how to apply knowledge and analyze ideas, reports the New York Times. For the first time, College Board is developing curriculum frameworks, not just writing the exams.

AP science and history courses have been “criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics,” reports the Times.

A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.

Next month, the College Board will release AP biology and U.S. history curriculum frameworks that will try to focus students on concepts and analysis.  “In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists.”

The “new AP” started with German and French language courses this year;  revised physics, chemistry, European history, world history and art history frameworks will be ready for exams in 2014 or 2015. English and math courses, which have drawn fewer complaints, will not be revised until later.

“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” says Trevor Packer, College Board’s vice president for AP.

For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution “drives the diversity and unity of life.” The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61-page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb.

And to the delight of teachers who have gotten an early peek at the plans, the board also makes clear what will not be on the exam. Part or all of at least 20 of the 56 chapters in the A.P. biology book that Mrs. Carlson’s class uses will no longer need to be covered. (One PowerPoint slide explaining the changes notes sardonically that teachers can retire their swift marches through the “Organ of the Day.”)

My daughter’s AP U.S. history teacher knew to the minute how much pre-exam time she had to cover each item in the curriculum, students believed.  It was a forced march, but everyone who kept up was well prepared to pass the exam.  The next year, the teacher missed six weeks due to a  health problem. To her horror, the sub fell behind the pace. My daughter volunteered as a teacher’s aide to help Mrs. W double-march her students to the exam.

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