<p>AP offerings are no longer a measure of how good a high school is. In fact some of the more “elite” schools (Fieldston, Choate, New Trier High School, my daughter’s high-school, and others) have gotten rid of the AP classes because AP classes teach to a rubric, hijack the curriculum, do not allow for intellectual digression, and do not result in durable learning (a 5 on the Spanish AP did not mean that my friends and I were ready for the class on Cervantes, into which I/we placed, not by a long shot). Admittedly, some parents were worried about the phasing out of APs, but then saw college acceptances were not eroded, not one bit, by the omission. In fact, the following encapsulates the advantages of not having APs:</p>
<p>These concerns are worth heeding. Fieldston tried to make new courses as rigorous and quite sweeping. A.P. European history became European Intellectual History. Students lost some of the “march to the sea” comprehensiveness of a survey course, but spent more time wrestling with the ideas of Luther, Montesquieu, Marx and Freud.</p>
<p>I can tell you that my daughter learned more (and had more time for expanded thinking and intellectual discovery), in her Honors classes, which had replaced the APs (2 AP classes remained and then, as of this year, have been reinvented as Honors classes) than I learned in my many AP classes in high school.</p>
<p>[Demoting</a> Advanced Placement - New York Times](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/education/04EDUCATION.html]Demoting”>Demoting Advanced Placement - The New York Times)</p>
<p>And according to the instigator (Alfie Kohn) of AP eradication:
Published in New York Times
05/06/2009</p>
<p>To the editor</p>
<p>Re “Many Teachers in Advanced Placement Voice Concern at Its Rapid Growth” (news article, April 29): </p>
<p>Much of what’s wrong with what passes for the school “reform” movement is captured in the report on Advanced Placement courses released by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The worry, it seems, is that “a generally good program” may be “weakened by making it too accessible.” </p>
<p>Much could be said about the troubling notion that quality is necessarily diluted by “democratization” — or, to put it the other way around, that the best kind of teaching must be restricted to an elite. But the real problem here is the uncritical assumption that A.P. courses are good merely because they’re “rigorous” — that is, very difficult. </p>
<p>In fact, these courses often represent an accelerated version of the worst sort of teaching: lecture-based, textbook-oriented, focused more on covering (a prefabricated curriculum) than on discovering, and above all, driven not by a desire to help students think deeply and become excited by ideas but by the imperative of preparing them for a test. </p>
<p>Could this tendency to confuse harder with better, and high test scores with real learning, be at the root of what’s wrong with an approach to improving education based mostly on “raising the bar”? </p>
<p>— Alfie Kohn</p>
<p>Finally, it was an admissions person at Harvard who coined the term “teacup”–it was a characterization of the (mostly) private school and upper-middle class product who could do nothing, really, beyond academic performance–e.g. that a lot of the kids were fragile in ways that counted (life skills, common sense–writing a check, doing laundry, knowing not to put wet clothes away in a drawer!!), outside of the realm of high grades and exalted test scores. And know that I am product of private school, as are my children, and I see where the deficits are, ubiquitously, in my peers and in my children’s peers. </p>
<p>In many ways, the kids who graduate our incredibly diverse, local public high school (children of university academicians and children who are baby-mamas) have practical (read survival) skills no other. They have had to traverse a plane of an obstructive administration, (some) teachers who are too demoralized to teach effectively while other teachers are inspirational, and metal detectors. At the same time, this school produces one of the most intellectually risk-taking group of kids you could ever imagine (playwrights who have gotten things produced off-Broadway and students who not only engineered the “Cicero” club but also are dedicated to speaking, exclusively, Latin when they get together); as an aside, the top 15% in the graduating class of 700-800 students get their first-choice college. I would also venture to say that their Latin is on par with the top prep/boarding school in the country. Last year, everyone who took the National Exam won a gold medal.</p>
<p>It is the worst sort of snobbery or ignorance, take your pick, to make a blanket statement that private is better than public–there are a host of holistic components to take into account that may make one man’s public another man’s private and vice versa.</p>