<p>I am coming late to this party, but I think there are a few things that people are missing:</p>
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<li><p>AP courses are not college courses (or if they are, they are college courses in a very impoverished sense). At best, they are challenging high school courses. We have gotten so used to the notion that the first couple semesters of college are really remedial high school that it is appropriate to use AP tests for placement in higher-than-introductory college classes. Giving actual college credit for AP tests is an economic decision, not an educational one. That’s not to say it’s not a valid, acceptable economic decision, but by no means is an AP class a substitute for a decent college class.</p></li>
<li><p>I generally don’t like the AP curricula, and think that they tend to be very content-driven and favor breadth over depth. In an ideal world, good high school classes would be much better than that. In the best schools they are. But in most schools they aren’t. That’s just the way it is. I like the IB curricula in theory a lot better, but I know that at my kids’ school IB implementation has been very rocky, and the kids who signed up for the full IB program are desperately unhappy, so much so that the program may collapse.</p></li>
<li><p>I agree with most of you that the Newsweek single-factor ranking is, at best, silly, annoying, and deceptive. I doubt anyone takes it seriously. But I think it is important to recognize that there are some legitimate angles to it. There is a substantial body of thought among educators that schools have to challenge students a lot more, and not just the elite students, but all students. CB has been promoting the AP program, successfully, for that for a number of years. The educational-politics position of the Newsweek writers is that the test of a school’s quality is the extent to which it is pushing its average students, not the top 10%, and that AP/IB tests per student is an acceptable metric for that (and perhaps the only available, validatable metric for that, although no one would argue it is perfect).</p></li>
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<p>That’s not such a silly position. My kids go (or went) to public high school in a huge urban district. The district has some excellent magnet schools, but with one or two exceptions the neighborhood high schools (many of which are hardly less racially segregated than schools in the pre-Brown South) reflect a decades-long abdication of all moral responsibility to educate the kids who attend them. They are next to useless, except as a way to keep some (not all) of the kids off the street during the day until they are 16 or 17. The current district administration, which is fairly thoughtful, has made pushing AP and IB classes into those schools a key component of its commitment to reverse the neglect. It is using those programs because the programs give BOTH teachers AND students external standards for what they ought to be accomplishing. Otherwise, there is a tacit agreement not to work so hard. And the programs, with their branding, communicate respect to the students, give them an externally validated credential of accomplishment, and actually have economic importance within the state college system which is for all intents and purposes the only good higher-education option for 95% of the kids.</p>
<p>My point is that what the school administration is doing here is reasonable, and in good faith, and grounded in morality and commitment to education. It may not turn out to be “right”, absolutely, but it is vastly preferable to the status quo, and there are lots of ways in which using the AP/IB programs make change and improvement more practical.</p>
<p>And that is exactly what Newsweek is trying to promote. Newsweek is trying to give recognition to schools that are doing that, and especially to schools in districts that support it economically by paying for the tests (and the external validation/evaluation that comes with having kids take the tests). AP/IB is probably not the right answer at all for a population of empowered kids who are already culturally disposed towards academic achievement. But it may be the right answer for kids who don’t have have those advantages. Or at least ONE right answer. So I sympathize (some, maybe a lot) with Newsweek’s agenda. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with most of the people in this community, but honestly I’m not so worried about us.</p>
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<li><p>That said, it’s still a really silly ranking system, because it stumbles over itself. When they started the rankings, they excluded academic magnet schools, because they were trying to reward schools that were challenging average students. But there is a huge difference between “average” students in Scarsdale, Lower Merion, or McLean, and average students in the South Bronx, North Philly, or Anacostia. So Newsweek wound up ranking magnet schools with average SATs up to the (ridiculously high) Scarsdale High level, thus excluding exactly 7 schools nationally (including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, almost certainly the top urban public high schools in the country). And what do you get at the top of the list? A bunch of academic magnet schools that push APs or IBs, something that undercuts the basic philosophical premise of the whole project.</p></li>
<li><p>My kids attend (or attended) a large academic magnet school in our city. Their school uses AP and IB classes as a tracking system, restricting access to them to the most successful students. (Lots of schools do that, something Newsweek is fighting against; their school fell just short of the expanded online ranking cut-off of one test per graduating senior.) My older child initially resisted the idea of taking a whole bunch of AP classes, but quickly found that the non-AP classes were next-to-useless, because many of the students simply chose not to do a lot of work. My younger child bought into the whole AP system from the start, and will wind up having taken 8 AP tests and one HL IB test. He has had a great learning experience, not because the AP curriculum is so great, but because the classes attract students who want to learn and are willing to compete with one another. (Only a couple of his favorite classes, though, have been AP classes. The school – it it a pretty good school – has a good assortment of challenging electives outside the AP system, too, where the teacher-generated curriculum is far superior to the AP curriculum.) </p></li>
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<p>But when Adcoms look at kids from this school, they are not wrong at all to value a high number of AP/IB classes. In general, it’s how the kids sort themselves into those who are willing to work hard and to challenge themselves (and others), and those who aren’t, or aren’t as much. It’s not a perfect indication – there are kids who challenge themselves in other ways, of course, and I hope the Adcoms look at those, too – but it’s pretty meaningful.</p>