Impending Significant Change in AP Tests

JHS
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:12:20 +0000

xiggi, I think you let your rhetoric get away with you sometimes.

I agree completely with you that AP courses are not college courses. I also agree that many high schools are failing. However,

(a) There are just as many, perhaps more, high schools that are NOT failing, where the average SAT segment score is well above 500, and where most of the students mastered 9th grade math in 7th grade. Those kids deserve an education, too. As do the kids like that in the “bad” schools.

(b) Here in Philadelphia, it is obvious how important it is to the social and political fabric of the city to keep middle-class, good-student kids in the public school system, rather than forcing them into private or Catholic schools. If the public school system doesn’t offer a challenging curriculum and a shot at Penn or Harvard, they’re gone, and with them will go a lot of civic glue and engagement by the citizenry with the school system. Sometimes I think that’s part of what you want to see happen, but I don’t.

(c) I don’t know what to think myself, but I know that it’s not only Jay Mathews who strongly believes that AP or IB standards have a lot to offer in improving the education of kids who are not at the top of the education heap. Paul Vallas, for example – now the superintendent in New Orleans, lately of Chicago and Philadelphia – believes strongly in them. Maybe he’s wrong, too . . . but I’ll take his track record with troubled school districts over yours.

(d) As I understand it (from talking with the IB people), the IB program was never designed to be a school-within-a-school, and they think that it’s far less successful when it’s done on that basis. It’s common here, for several reasons: AP entrenchment, the cost of retraining teachers and setting up the IB courses, IB getting a foot in the door as a pilot project. There’s nothing inherently separatist about the IB curriculum, and they promote it as a whole-school thing.