June 2007: Advanced Placement
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A program of the National Governors Association (NGA) attempts to make Advanced Placement classes more widely available, recruit students who traditionally have not enrolled in AP courses, and strengthen curriculum to improve the success rate for AP students. (See “Rigorous Courses, Fresh Enrollment,” Education Week, Vol. 26, No. 36, May 9, 2007, pp. 28-31.) This program is being piloted in six states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada, and Wisconsin; the common strategies in all of these states are a focus on training teachers, recruiting students, and strengthening the middle school and early high school curriculum leading up to the AP classes. Advanced Placement, a program of the New York City-based College Board, offers high school students an opportunity to earn college credit in 22 subjects if they score well on a standardized, national end-of-year exam. In the high school class of 2006, 61% of the 666,067 students (24% of the 2006 class) who took at least one AP course scored a 3 or better on a 5-point scale that serves as a predictor of college success. Increasingly, schools and states are including more AP courses as they attempt to redesign high school classes and make them more demanding. The program is being offered in 49 schools over the six pilot states.
These 49 schools reveal a broad diversity, including both rural and urban schools as well as schools both small and large. For instance, among the eight Maine schools participating in the NGA program is the 210-student Vinalhaven School, a K-12 school that has a total of 25 staff and is located on the island of Vinalhaven off the Maine coast. The goal in Vinalhaven is to increase the number of AP classes offered and to recruit more students, especially students who traditionally may not have attempted AP classes. Another of the eight participating Maine schools is the 1,050-student Portland High School, where the goal is to recruit more minority and low income students, including students from the Somali and Sudanese immigrant populations in Portland. Although such different schools face specific challenges, all of the 49 schools involved in the program face some common challenges: lack of teacher training, little money to create new classes, weak curricula in lower grades that don’t adequately prepare students for AP courses, as well as difficulty in attracting minority and low income students to AP classes.
Each of the six states involved in the NGA program was awarded $500,000, and early indications at the end of the first full year of the program showed a marked increase in the number of enrolled minority students, low-income students, and AP classes offered in the participating schools. Teachers and administrators in participating schools are already seeing improved participation and student performance as well as teacher training, even outside of the AP courses. Part of the reason for the overall improvement in the participating schools is the strengthening of the general curriculum in middle school and early high school grades necessary to better prepare students for the AP classes. The approach in this NGA pilot program is markedly different from the standard approach to AP classes. In the NGA program, AP courses are open to anyone who wants to participate, with the hope that more minority, low income, and nontraditional students will take advantage of the AP opportunity. Most schools limit AP applicants through a screening process. Minorities, particularly black students, are underrepresented in AP classes. Racial and cultural identity issues may be part of the reason for the lower numbers of minorities and low-income students in AP courses, so many of the pilot schools in the NGA program are recruiting minority and low income students in groups, using letters and invitations mailed to parents, open houses, and individual recruitment by teachers to bridge the barriers of identity, culture, and income.
Although all 49 schools face many similar challenges, each school has specific struggles as well. In rural schools, the small population has made it difficult to justify advanced classes for so few students. Larger urban schools may have enough teachers and students to justify the advanced classes but students may not be adequately prepared, or the AP courses may find greater competition for funds that need to be shared with other academic programs that don’t exist in the smaller rural schools. Additionally, some of the larger schools and urban schools may have existing AP courses; in those situations there has been a need to convince teachers and administrators to look at AP courses with a new and substantially different approach. It is unknown what will happen to the efforts of this NGA program when the program money runs out in December, but some states already seemed to have made an ongoing commitment to a stronger AP approach and have begun allocating funds to increase the effort.
