The New Advanced Placement Push
Emphasis on the popular college-level courses increases
By Pamela Burdman
GUSTINE, CALIFORNIA
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Despite a 4.13 grade point average, Gustin (CA) High School senior Sara Shaw was not
admitted to her first-choice colleges, apparently because she had taken no Advanced Placement
Courses. |
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THIS TINY TOWN of 4,288 has its
share of dairies, antique stores and
taquerias—not to mention a yearly
oxen and cart parade. But the youth of
Gustine have yet to see something that
state leaders increasingly say they’re entitled
to have: Their high school is one of
dozens around the state that currently offers
no Advanced Placement courses.
Gustine senior Sara Shaw is graduating
with a 4.13 average and will attend the
University of California at Santa Barbara
in the fall, but she believes AP courses
might have helped her get admitted to the
three UC campuses that turned her down:
Berkeley, UCLA and San Diego.
“AP gives people graduating a fighting
chance,” she said. “I had the highest
grades I could have. I’m involved in everything.
Without any college courses or AP
test scores, it hurt me,” she said.
Just 90 miles away at Palo Alto High
School, in the shadow of Stanford University,
students can choose from an array of
18 different AP courses in everything from
calculus and English to environmental science
and music theory.
Palo Alto junior Greg Schwartz has taken
two AP courses so far, and plans to
take three during his senior year. “That’s
not as many as I’d meant to,” he said.
“The courses are very good, and it looks
good on your transcript.”
Indeed, Advanced Placement courses,
once the province of a handful of elite private
schools, are so widely recognized as
important components
of high school curriculum
that California
Governor Gray Davis
is calling upon every
school in the state to
offer at least one of the
courses by this fall and
a total of four by September
2001, even if
that means providing
the courses online.
Davis clearly is being
pushed by California’s
educational exigencies:
lagging admissions
of minorities to
the state’s most competitive
university campuses
as well as a civil rights
rights lawsuit challenging
the AP gap. Already California
students take one-sixth of all AP exams
given nationally, partly because the University
of California gives extra weight to
AP courses when calculating students’
grade point averages.
Though those forces are specific to
California, Davis’ move is right in step
with a national trend. In his book Class
Struggle, journalist Jay Mathews ranks the
nation’s top high schools according to how
many AP courses students take.
No one expects that every student will
enroll in the AP program, but the new
educational policies envision a future in
which every student at least has a chance
to do so. That thinking is a far cry from
what the founders of Advanced Placement—
three East Coast prep schools and
three Ivy League universities—had in
mind when the program began in 1955.
Once an avenue to keep privileged students
from getting bored in high school,
AP has grown into a nationwide program
overseen by the College Board, the coalition
of colleges that also coordinates the
Scholastic Assessment
Test (SAT). The
AP course curricula
are standardized, and
culminate each May
with exams administered
by the Educational
Testing Service.
In 45 years, the
ranks of AP students
have swelled to more
than 700,000, at more
than half of the
nation’s high schools.
Last year, more than
a million exams were
administered in 32
fields. At thousands
of colleges and universities,
students
with passing grades
(3, 4 or 5, out of 5
points) can earn
course credit and/or
advance to higher
level courses.
With that expansion,
a new philosophy is taking hold: that
no qualified student should be shut out of
the option of taking Advanced Placement
courses. Ensuring that, however, often
begins in elementary and middle school.
At the Alief Independent School District
in southwest Houston, for example,
administrators have changed their criteria
for entrance to the pre-AP mathematics
program, which starts in seventh grade.
“It used to be an exclusive program.
We tended to screen students in and out.
You had to be ‘gifted’ or ‘precocious,’”
said Marsha Lilly, coordinator of secondary
mathematics for the district. “This
year, our philosophy has been open enrollment.
If a student chooses to be there,
they have every right to be there.”
Similar thinking on the part of teacher
Jaime Escalante, in a story popularized by
the film, Stand and Deliver, inspired poor
minority students at Los Angeles’ Garfield
High School to rise to the occasion of taking
the AP Calculus exam. So many of the
students passed (more than two-thirds)
that ETS officials suspected cheating.
The new AP push is backed by more
than philosophy. The federal government
recently increased funding for its Advanced
Placement Incentive Program
from $4 million to $15 million in the current
year. U.S. Department of Education
officials are seeking $20 million for next
year.
In February a National Forum to Expand
Advanced Placement Opportunities
was co-hosted by the Department of Education
and the College Board, the organization
that coordinates the AP program.
Twenty-five states and the District of
Columbia have already begun initiatives
to promote AP, and many more have applied
for the new money.
The federal program is intended to
provide low-income students access to AP.
About $3 to $4 million is reserved to pay
test fees for poor students. The rest of the
$15 million can be used for teacher training,
classroom equipment, distance learning
and other initiatives to expand access
to AP or the International Baccalaureate,
another advanced studies program.
Both Texas and Florida now are spending
about $11 million annually on AP
programs, and California has allotted
more than $30 million in next year’s budget.
Though the furor over competitive college
admissions has contributed to the
new focus on AP courses, it is not clear
how much students with no such courses
on their records actually suffer when they
apply to college.
UC is one of the few universities known
to assign extra weight to the courses, allowing
students to boost their grade point
averages above 4.0. But officials at UC
Berkeley and UCLA, the two most
selective campuses, insist they look at each
school’s course offerings and do not penalize
applicants for not taking courses that
are not available to them. Students also
can earn the extra points by taking honors
classes or enrolling at a community college,
the admissions officials point out.
Besides the admissions controversies,
part of the steam for the AP movement
also comes from research suggesting that
the courses contribute to students’ success
once they get to college. The most oftcited
report is a longitudinal study of 1982
high school graduates conducted by the
U.S. Department of Education.
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Greg Schwartz, a junior at Palo Alto (CA) High School, has his pick of 18 different
Advanced Placement classes, from calculus and English to environmental science and music theory. |
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While the report concluded that AP
courses didn’t increase students’ access to
college in general, it did find that a challenging
high school curriculum, including
AP courses, contributed more to a student’s
chances of finishing college than did
high grades or test scores.
“Lots of people go to college without
AP, but the people who go to college with
AP are more likely to finish,” said senior
research analyst Clifford Adelman, author
of the longitudinal study. “Why? Because
it’s not merely AP, it’s the road to AP. You
can’t merely plunk down AP calculus on a
school that doesn’t offer pre-calculus or
trigonometry.”
Other studies, primarily by the College
Board, have shown that in many disciplines,
students placed directly into upper-level
college courses after passing an AP
exam score better than classmates with no
AP courses in high school.
AThe AP push also has gathered momentum
as the rollback of affirmative action
in California and other states casts a
spotlight on stark discrepancies in educational
opportunities along income and
racial lines.
Though no national figures are available,
the state of Florida gives an indication
of how AP participation rates are skewed:
In Florida, 59.1 percent of white students
take AP courses, compared to 6.2 percent
of African Americans, 14.8 percent of
Hispanics, and 7.6 percent of Asians.
In California, similar discrepancies
exist. According to a study by California
State University’s Institute for Education
Reform, “African Americans and Hispanics
do not participate in the AP program,
even when it is highly available, at rates
that reflect their proportionality in the
school student enrollment figures. Conversely,
Asians participate heavily, often at
more than double their rate of school
enrollment.”
AP director Lee Jones points out that
the phenomenon is not unique to AP.
“That would be the case no matter what
measure of educational quality you looked
at,” he noted. “Black and Latino students
are underrepresented in the distribution of
resources.”
Nevertheless, AP has
been singled out, and
even became the focus
of a lawsuit filed last
year by the American
Civil Liberties Union,
making California the
focal point of the national
movement to
expand access to the
rigorous college-level
courses. The issue has
particular salience in
California, where minority
admissions have
fallen off at UC’s most
selective campuses
and professional
schools.
ACLU officials say
they are prepared to
settle the suit, now
that the Legislature
has approved the
$30.4 million proposed
by state Senator Martha Escutia and
backed by Governor Davis, including
grants of up to $75,000 for schools that have
few or no AP courses.
The list of such schools is hard to nail
down, because AP courses have not been
well tracked until recently. Though the
state lists 129 schools without AP courses,
the Public Policy Institute of California
found 138, and Cal State researchers
found only 64. Whatever list is used, rural
schools dominate, because they are
typically small schools with a dearth of
both qualified AP teachers and AP-ready
students.
Gustine High School, for example, has
just 30 teachers and 400 students. Each
year, about 40 or 45 students head off to
college, mostly to area junior colleges.
Typically, only a handful applies to UC
and other selective schools.
Gustine math teacher Larry Frago says
he has been wanting to offer an AP course
since coming to the school 23 years ago,
but was turned down by principal after
principal. At one point, the school tried
offering an AP class in U.S. History, but it
was cancelled after two years because of
low enrollment. And last year, an English
teacher encouraged a handful of students
to try the AP English Literature exam, but
without the accompanying course, none of
them passed.
Now, schools like Gustine will be eligible
for $75,000 four-year grants to meet
the governor’s goals. Frago finally will get
an opportunity to teach AP calculus in the
fall. He already has enlisted 12 students,
including junior Dana Cozzitorto, an outdoorsy
16-year-old who hopes to study
landscape architecture in college.
“It’s a big decision,” said Cozzitorto,
daughter of a rancher and a meat locker
employee. “This will look good for me. I
know I need strength of schedule for the
universities. I’m not bad in math, but it’s
going to be a hard class.”
Gustine principal Charlene Silva said
she also would consider offering students
online AP courses, but it will be another
year before the school’s classrooms gain
Internet connections.
Nearby Dos Palos High School is already networked, and Principal Michael
Rivard plans to take advantage of grants
available through the University of California
to provide six online classes beginning
this fall: Microeconomics, Macroeconomics,
Government, U.S. History,
Physics and Statistics.
“I don’t have the students or the staff to
be able to offer those courses live,” said
Rivard. Dos Palos students can take honors
classes or enroll at nearby Merced College,
a community college, but Rivard felt
the absence of AP was hurting his students
when they applied, for example, to a
scholarship program at Cal State Fresno.
For inner city schools, however, the
obstacles to offering AP tend to be more
complex. Though urban schools are larger,
and most have some AP courses, there are
often few seats available relative to the
size of the school, and sometimes the courses
are hampered by quality problems.
For example, the ACLU has alleged in
another lawsuit that students enrolled in
AP physics and AP English at John F.
Kennedy High School in Richmond, in the
San Francisco Bay area, did not have a
formal, long-term teacher for the entire
school year. As a result, several students
decided against taking the AP test this
spring. And Mark Keppel High School in
Alhambra, California, the suit charges,
hasn’t updated its AP literature text since
the 1960s.
According to a study conducted by Cal
State, “More than 90 percent of California
public high schools offer some Advanced
Placement classes, but many students are
left with limited or no access.”
At the same time, blacks and Latinos
who do take AP courses at urban schools
don’t always perform well on the AP
exams. At the predominantly African
American Dorsey High School in Los
Angeles, for example, principal Nancy
Rene notes, “They’ve got high-level teaching,
but they cannot pass at the level of
students from other schools.”
Last year, for example, though Dorsey
offered seven AP courses, and more than
200 students took them, only 85 students
took AP exams, and only 11 of them
passed.
As always, such problems are easier to
identify than solutions.
In some places, incentives have been
tried. For more than 15 years, the state of
Florida has offered school districts roughly
$600 for each student who passes an AP
course.
State officials credit the policy for an
expansion in the number of students taking
AP courses. However, that expansion
also coincided with a national trend, acknowledged
Tom Baird, educational policy
consultant for the state, so it is hard to
tell how much of that was influenced by
the incentive policy.
Teachers will begin to see that incentive
money under a recently approved policy of
Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Under the
system, AP teachers can receive up to
$2,000: $50 for each student passing an AP
exam, and, at low-performing schools, an
additional $500 simply for teaching the
class. Florida has budgeted about $11
million for various AP programs.
The incentive approach also has gained
popularity in Texas with the work of the
O’Donnell Foundation. The foundation
began working with small school districts
south of Dallas about ten years ago, offering
$100 to students for each AP exam
they passed, as well as $100 to the student’s
teacher and $100 to the school.
The program was transported to ten
Dallas city schools in 1995. In that time,
according to Paul Williamson, O’Donnell’s
outgoing director of AP programs, the
schools witnessed a sharp increase in the
number of AP exams taken—from 140
exams a year to more than 2,000 exams
this spring.
When it recently increased annual
spending on AP from $1.3 million to $11
million, Texas’ legislature allotted $2 to $3
million in “reward” money for schools
where students pass AP exams.
It is a strategy that some educators
question, however. “It’s sort of a slippery
slope,” said David Breneman, dean of the
Curry School of Education at the University
of Virginia. “This is basic curriculum.
Are we going to start offering people $50
for teaching kids algebra in the seventh
grade?”
But Evelyn Hiatt, senior director of advanced
academic services in Texas, said
the AP incentives will encourage schools
to improve their pre-AP offerings. “It’s
incorrect to think this is an AP incentive
alone. You can’t have good results on AP
unless you have a strong middle and high
school program,” she said.
Two states have tried mandating that
schools offer AP courses. Virginia requires
high schools to offer at least two of the
courses, according to the College Board.
And since 1994, Indiana has expected
schools to provide the full array of math
and science courses.
The Indiana statute is not fully enforced,
since schools can exempt themselves
by claiming they have no “qualified
students,” according to Bob Schweitzer, a
state educational official. However,
Schweitzer said, parents and students have
successfully used the law to pressure their
high schools to provide more AP offerings.
Under California’s proposed program,
some 400 schools would be eligible for AP
Challenge Grants of $75,000 over four
years. The money would go first to schools
with three or fewer AP classes, followed
by schools with no AP math or science
classes, schools with low college going
rates, and schools with a majority of low income
students.
Awarded schools would be expected to
offer four of the courses in core curriculum
areas like English, math and science
by the 2001–’02 school year.
Amidst all this activity, it is generally
assumed that Advanced Placement is a
high quality academic program.
But questions do persist. For example,
the National Research Council began an
evaluation of AP math and science exams
after a study revealed that U.S. AP students
did not fare as well as advanced level
students from other countries.
And some experts wonder whether the
very emphasis on AP courses has become
disproportionate.
“It’s not clear to me that saying every
school needs to have AP courses is serving
these students,” said Kim Reuben, an economist
with the Public Policy Institute of
California. “You can decide to offer calculus,
but it’s not clear that’s where your
teacher should go instead of teaching another
algebra class.”
Kati Haycock, director of The Education
Trust in Washington, D.C., also advises
caution when it comes to AP: “If you
actually look at overall data, the fastest
growing part of the high school curriculum
these days is AP,” she said. “At the same
time, the fastest growing part of the college
curriculum is remedial courses. Does
this really make sense?
&“We’d be better off agreeing on where
high school ends and college begins…and
get that right before we get carried away.
When kids are ready for college-level
work, have them take college classes. Why
is AP the answer?”
Evelyn Hiatt of Texas acknowledges
that college courses generally can provide
the same advanced-level work as AP classes.
Indeed, AP was designed to substitute
for college work.
“We don’t really take a stand that one
is better than the other,” said Hiatt. However,
she and others noted that AP and International
Baccalaureate have the advantage
of being standardized nationally (or
internationally).
That is the very reason why Fairtest, a
national organization that opposes the use
of the SAT in college admissions, has not
targeted AP. Though the organization
agrees that minorities need better access
to the courses, it has little complaint about
the tests themselves.
“As courses and exams go, AP is designed
in the right manner,” said Bob
Schaeffer, Fairtest’s public education director.
“The standards and curriculum are
well-publicized. It does create a level
playing field. You know that kids are being
assessed on the same curriculum as
everyone else in the country.”
Some teachers say they prefer not to
teach AP courses, because the curriculum
is so closely tied to the
exam that there is little
room for creativity on the
part of students or teachers.
That is something that
has worried Greg Schwartz’
U.S. History teacher at
Palo Alto High, Meredith
Warren. “Sometimes I
have to shut down a good
conversation in my class
because we’re on a time-table.
I sometimes envy the
luxury of the teachers who
can spend an extra day because
the interest is there,”
she said.
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Palo Alto (CA) High School history teacher Meredith Warren worries that Advanced
Placement classes are too prescriptive, allowing teachers and students little room for creativity. |
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Warren makes a point of
balancing out her class with
oral presentations, and she
insists on teaching important
topics—the internment
of Japanese Americans
during World War II, for example—even
though she knows they won’t be on the
exam.
A 13-year veteran of AP, she is one of
Palo Alto High’s most highly regarded
teachers. She clearly delights in challenging
her students, and takes pride that
most years about half of her students score
5 on the AP exam. And unlike some
teachers, she said she doesn’t discourage
class laggards from sitting for the test just
to boost the class record.
Nevertheless, Warren agrees that the
AP craze can be taken too far. “Sometimes
kids want to take too many, or
sometimes their parents have this idea that
the kids have to have 20 APs on their
record. That’s a fight I fight all the time,”
she said.
It’s a fight that Sara Shaw and her university
bound classmates at Gustine would
have loved a chance to have fought.
