The Blue Blog

The original article was written by Stacy A. Teicher and can be found at:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0208/p15s01-legn.html

The article I read this week discusses the growing amount of students who are taking and passing (a score of 3 or above) Advanced Placement classes in the United States each year. Of course, part of me is overjoyed to hear this tidbit of news- the more students that can get some college-level experience, or maybe even college credits in before high school ends, the better. In some states the amount of minorities that have taken AP exams has increased as well, and this is encouraging given the fact that disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities are often left out of the opportunity for advanced learning experiences in our schools. Another part of me is, as usual, taking a mental trip back to my own high school where we only had the resources to provide three AP classes (biology, chemistry, and English), and biology and chemistry could only be offered every other year. Only one class period was allotted every year for each AP class, limiting the overall number of students that could take the course and causing conflicts with some other classes such as band. With these memories in mind, I hardly think that the growth of AP course takers could be even throughout the country.

As a College Board member rightly points out in the article, economically disadvantaged students and minorities make up a large proportion of the students who are left out of the AP experience. I am assuming that this is because they are the students who are forced to go to under-funded schools that cannot afford the extra resources to provide AP classes. President Bush’s proposed remedy for making AP classes more common across the nation is to train 70,000 AP math and science teachers in five years. Upon further investigation, I found that he has requested an additional $90 million in funding for this program in his FY 2007 budget report. (For more on the money he is requesting for education programs, go to http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/ 2006/02/02062006.html.) I think it will be interesting to see how the government sees fit to allocate these millions of dollars in funding. Will states give schools with no AP classes money to train teachers? Will special programs be set up in each county to train teachers? The budget goes into further details about the funding when it says that it will be geared towards the areas of math, science, and foreign languages. I personally would have loved to take an AP history or government class- will those programs be ignored?

At the end of the article, almost as a little aside, a man named Bob Wise says, “Indeed, the challenge of high schools is, first of all, reducing a dropout rate that, nationally, is almost one-third.” This opens up a whole new area of discussion, which some people have recently been commenting on in their blogs in the discussion about whether or not it is appropriate to offer monetary rewards to students for perfect attendance. Mr. Wise has indeed brought up a valid point; while we are working at the high end, trying to get more and more students into advanced classes, is what we’re doing at the other really working to keep students in school? His cautious optimism about the rise in AP participation mirrors my own feelings, in that the successes are wonderful but we need to remember that the needs of all students should be served.