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TODAY HE IS THE
superintendent of schools in Bellevue, Wash., a hilly and
ethnically diverse Seattle suburb on the leading edge of a
movement to take this lesson to the next level. Riley wants
to make the hardest classes in U.S. high schools today - the
college-level Advanced Placement (AP) or International
Baccalaureate (IB) courses - mandatory for nearly all
graduates. If he succeeds, he will help accelerate a
transformation of American secondary education that has
sparked intense debate among educators.
This month
more than a million students in 14,000 high schools took
1,750,000 AP exams, a 10 percent increase over last year and
twice the number of these college-level tests taken in 1996.
That means that 245 more schools are eligible for the 2003
Challenge Index, which ranks 739 public schools according to
the ratio of AP or IB tests taken by all students divided by
the number of graduating seniors. Schools that select more
than half their students by exams or other academic criteria
are not eligible, because they have few, if any, of the
average students who need a boost from AP or IB. Some of
these magnet schools achieve extraordinary results, partly
because they get the best students. In the last index, in
2000, only 494 schools were included. (AP’s younger,
European-based counterpart, IB, is also on the rise, with
77,285 tests given in American schools this month.) The
index uses AP and IB as a measure because schools that push
these tests are most likely to stretch young
minds—which should be the fundamental purpose of
education.
Some experts think AP is growing so fast and spreading so
far it could eventually supplant the SAT and the ACT as
America’s most influential test. At Harvard—the
dream school for many high-performing seniors—the dean
of admissions says AP is already a better predictor of
college grades than the SAT. One reason could be that
students get only one shot at the AP, unlike the SATs, which
many retake several times in order to boost their scores.
More important, AP tests a whole year of learning, while the
SAT assesses a specific set of skills that many educators
think have little relation to academic potential in college.
College-admissions officers at many schools say that AP and
IB have acquired the status of backstage passes at a rock
concert. Selective universities begin to ask questions if
they see that applicants have not taken the tests available
at their high schools. Even freshmen and sophomores are
crowding into AP courses once open only to juniors and
seniors. At Miller Place High School on New York’s Long
Island, guidance director Joseph W. Connolly says 40 percent
of this year’s 10th graders took AP European
history—an unheard-of proportion a decade ago.
Both AP and IB
students answer lengthy free-response questions that are
graded by actual human beings (AP also has multiple-choice
questions). If their scores are high enough, students can
earn college credit. They also get a taste of the
higher-level exams they’ll face on campus. Jordan Wish,
a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville,
Md., took two AP and four IB tests this month—25 hours
of tests with not much time for sleep each night.
“Right now I am not feeling so good,” Wish said as
he crammed in some last-minute studying for the difficult AP
physics test. But he thinks the extra effort will be good
preparation for Princeton, where he’ll be a freshman
this fall.
Proponents say AP and
IB have exposed many average suburban teenagers to a level
of instruction once reserved only for honor students and,
even more significantly, have energized inner-city schools.
From 1998 to 2002, AP participation by underrepresented
minority students increased 77 percent and participation by
low-income students increased 101 percent, while overall
participation rose only 48 percent. But some administrators
and university educators warn that pushing the programs too
far and too quickly could dilute their benefits. A recent
report by the National Research Council says AP and IB
courses should delve more deeply into fewer topics. A few
colleges have become more demanding as well. Last year
Harvard announced that it would give advanced standing only
to students who had the top AP grade, a 5, the equivalent of
a college A, on four required AP tests. There are complaints
that many of the new AP—students are failing the tests.
And some high-school principals say that it is better for
their more-ambitious students to take courses at local
colleges rather than enroll in AP or IB. “There are
many of us who would celebrate the exit of AP from
high-school life,” says Marilyn Colyar, assistant
principal at San Marino High School in California. “I
certainly believe in a rigorous curriculum for all
students,” she says, “but “a class can be
challenging and relevant, AP or not.”
The controversy over
AP has become particularly intense in the private schools
and affluent public schools that were the first to adopt the
program in 1956, when it was little more than a way to keep
high-performing seniors from getting bored. Andrew Meyers,
head of the history department at the Ethical Culture
Fieldston School in New York City, says he was not
sympathetic three years ago when a student complained about
being forced to stay on the AP superhighway without stopping
to explore some intriguing side roads. But then, Meyers
says, he realized that when-ever a student in his AP
American-history course asked a thoughtful question not
quite on the topic, he often heard himself saying,
“That’s interesting... but we have to move on to
the next era.” Fieldston, Dalton, Exeter and a few
other private schools have declared themselves AP-free
zones. Instead of the AP history course he used to teach
each spring, Meyers is offering one of his favorite
electives, “Inventing Gotham,” during which each
student devises a historical tour of New York City. Similar
electives are being offered at other schools shedding the AP
label, although many of their students still take AP tests
in order to impress colleges.
Many advocates
of college-level courses say the prep schools are guilty of
an elitist reaction to programs that are helping more and
more average and below-average schools, as if AP and IB were
last year’s high fashions that had to be thrown out
because similar clothes were being sold at Kmart. At the
average high school, “the —kids would not get into
elite colleges if they did not have AP courses,” says
Nicholas Lemann, author of “The Big Test,” a
history of the SAT, “but Fieldston knows that for
socioeconomic reasons, their kids do not need AP to persuade
those colleges to take them.” Lemann and others fear
that the rarefied complaints of privileged schools could
slow the spread of AP and IB to poor districts where
students need the challenge.
Some teachers have
accused the College Board, which sponsors the AP, of
promoting the program in order to collect the $80 test fees
from all those students eager for an advantage in the
college-admissions race. (IB is even more expensive, but
schools usually pay the test fees.) Educators also bicker
over the growing use of AP as a measure of school quality.
NEWSWEEK’s list of top high schools has been compared
to U.S. News & World Report’s annual
“America’s Best Colleges” list by educators
who say such rankings distort the strengths of individual
schools. The National Research Council report complained
that the NEWSWEEK list had “taken on a life of its
own,” with high schools publishing their ratings and
schools not making the list posting “disclaimers on
their Web sites indicating why they are not there.”
Despite this
criticism, the majority of educators say they continue to
support the growth of AP and IB. A recent straw-poll survey
by the American School Board Journal found that 80 percent
of readers wanted more of their students to take the
college-level courses. And initial opposition often
disappears if schools provide extra help for students who
need it. Pat Hyland, principal of Mountain View (Calif.)
High School, says she heard many worries when she opened her
AP courses to all, but they soon faded away. “We have
added tutorial sessions and a variety of other measures to
bolster the kids,” she says.
Many
communities have found that adding AP really turns a school
around. Seven years ago, when Tim Berkey became principal of
Perry High School in a rural area east of Cleveland, there
were no AP or IB classes at all. He told teachers about the
marked change in student attitude and achievement he had
seen at his previous school, Adlai Stevenson in suburban
Chicago, when the AP program was opened to everyone willing
to work that hard. Five years ago Perry High started with 87
AP tests; this month it administered 214. “We believed
in kids, held high expectations, provided them with the
resources, tools and challenging opportunities, and then
simply got out of their way,” Berkey says.
Lemann,
who thinks the SAT hinders educational improvement, says AP
and IB have had the opposite effect—much to the
surprise of many educators who are generally opposed to the
spread of standardized tests. “It has become a
wonderful and effective way to produce a massive upgrading
of the high- school curriculum,” Lemann says.
“These were unintended consequences, but good
unintended consequences.”
The commitment to
giving more high schoolers a useful dose of college
exam-week trauma has turned an old elementary-school
building in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., into an IB
hothouse—and the top school on the 2003 NEWSWEEK list.
Five hundred teenagers, picked by lottery from 13 local
districts, have enrolled in the International Academy, while
their neighborhood friends shy away from the workload.
“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,”
says Bhavana Bhaya, a senior who took 30 hours of IB exams
this month at the public school near Detroit, “but I am
glad I am here.” The effort paid off, says senior James
Kurecka. He was afraid his 1270 SAT score and 27 ACT score
would not have been enough to get into the University of
Michigan’s prestigious College of Engineering; he
believes the IB label did the trick.
Even students whose
grades and test scores in high school were mediocre are more
likely to graduate from college if they have had some
challenging high-school —courses such as AP and IB,
according to a 1999 study by U.S. Education Department
researcher Clifford Adelman. That finding was particularly
true for minorities. The Science Academy of South Texas, a
public school that draws students from three rural counties
in the Rio Grande Valley, has sent several migrant
workers’ children to high-tech colleges by exposing
them to difficult AP assignments. Norma Flores, a senior,
says she often started school late in the fall because her
migrant-laborer family needed her in the cornfields. “I
had to work twice as hard to catch up,” she says. But
next fall, fortified by college-level courses, she will
study aerospace engineering at the University of Texas-Pan
American campus in Edinburg.
Riley, the
superintendent in Bellevue, says the criticism of AP and IB
demonstrates how ubiquitous these programs have become, and
how many previously ignored students are being helped.
“Elitists will always try to find higher ground when it
becomes apparent that others can scale their hill,” he
says. “While AP’s standards, tests and curriculum
have not changed, there are those who once thought the
program was the gold standard but now see it as tarnished.
What’s the only, and I underscore only, thing that has
changed? More kids are included.” And like his students
in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, he’s betting that they
will all thrive.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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