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Health & Fitness

Equity or Excellence (Part 1)

A look at the trend of dropping Honors courses for Advanced Placement, without accountability. Should we be trying to produce the "best and the brightest" or the "entitled and self-important"?

 

So today I wanted to discuss the recent presentation at the January 9th School Committee meeting about Honors courses and Advanced Placement courses at the High School. As I watched the meeting in my living room I found that much of the information being presented to this new Committee was not completely accurate, or certain things were being omitted. As a member of the School Committee for the past two years I have been very vocal about my concerns with the path that the school administration is pulling us down when it comes to Honors and Advanced Placement, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Back in November, the High School Administration was presenting to the School Committee on what is called their Whole School Improvement Plan (WSIP). Generally this is a plan developed by the administration to inform the Committee what will be the focus for that school year. When the WSIP was being presented a year ago (2010) the increased participation in Advanced Placement courses was discussed and, as always seems to be the case, only the quantity of students taking AP and the quantity of AP classes was presented. From my vantage point the quantity of students taking AP and the amount of classes being taken (some students take more than one class) is indeed important, but it is only half the story. I believe that our students need to be challenging themselves, such as taking higher level courses, but they need to be succeeding as well. So I wanted to know about the results in regard to this increased participation.

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Let me quickly explain Honors and Advanced Placement courses for those who may not understand these higher level high school courses. First there is “College Prep”. College Preparatory is the regular level of coursework and is what the majority of students take. Honors is a higher level and is for students who want to challenge themselves, often because they have a special interest in the subject material. Advanced Placement (AP) is supposed to be actual college level coursework and is much more difficult than Honors (or at least is supposed to be). Historically, AP has been for those students who were excelling at school beyond the Honors level, or at least in certain areas, were ready for the challenge and rigor of college level courses and had a high likelihood of being able to handle the course load and would do well (or at least pass the final national standardized test).

At the end of the school year, actually in May, students take a nationally standardized AP exam for that class which results in a score between a 1 and a 5. The College Board, who develops the tests, considers a score of a 1 or 2 as failing and scores of 3, 4 and 5 as passing. Universities want to see numerous things from prospective students. They want to see them challenging themselves and they want to see that they are able to meet the challenge. Some colleges will accept a passing (or qualifying) score of 3, 4 or 5 as “credit”, meaning the freshman student would not have to take the introductory class in that topic, though many universities, especially the top ones like Harvard and Yale, will not accept AP credit no matter what the score the student received. But pretty much all colleges want to see success (passing scores of 3, 4 or 5).

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So back in 2010 I asked the question to the administration of what the percentage of students who were getting a failing score of 1 on the AP exams and the response was surprisingly 20%. I was taken back as to the high percentage, as I felt that one-fifth of our students taking AP classes and getting a failing score of 1 was unacceptable. And to give you an understanding of what a student needs to do in order to get a score of one, it was explained at the January 9th School Committee meeting that just attempting to answer the questions results in a score of 1 out of 5. Some of you might be asking why I was only looking at scores of 1 since a score of 2 is also considered a failing score. Well I had initially brought up scores of 1 and 2, but in discussions with my colleagues and the administration I developed an understanding that there was “value” in students receiving a score of 2, but even the high school administration admitted that scores of 1 were not acceptible and that they had a goal to decrease that to 10% (though when I pushed to have this goal incorporated as an official annual goal the administration balked). Some would argue that just taking the class, even if they fail, helps prepare a student for college and that in itself is a success. They often quote how “studies show that students who take AP do better in college”, but when I’ve researched this what I actually found is that “according to national research, students who pass at least one AP exam are three times more likely to graduate from college than those who do not.” Passing at least one AP exam is very different than just taking the class.

So a year later, in 2011, when the high school administration was presenting their WSIP I was concerned about further reductions of the Honors level courses being replaced by more Advanced Placement. See a couple of weeks prior, during the election debate, a question was asked about a rumor that more Honors classes were going to be dropped in order to be replaced with more Advanced Placement. This was concerning to me, not only because I didn’t want to see more Honors classes lost, but because the School Committee had not been informed of this possibility. Since the School Committee is the governing body, who is responsible for the school district, a decision of this nature would need to be approved by the School Committee via an official vote and if there were plans of further Honors reductions and the Committee had not been part of that discussion, I would have had a concern if their was any semblance of truth to this rumor. So I asked a very specific question to the high school principal asking him to dispel the rumor that more Honors were going to be dropped. His response was that he 'could absolutely dispel that rumor' and that no more Honors were going to be dropped.

So that brings me up to th January 9th School Committee meeting. While presenting, the high school principal explained how back in November he informed the Committee that “ALL” Honors classes were not being dropped. But see, I was the one that asked the question back in November and my question and the response had nothing to do with “ALL” Honors classes, it had to do with any more Honors classes. So it seems that what the Committee was informed back in November was inaccurate as the whole point of the presentation was more Honors going away and more AP going in!

So why is this concerning? Well it all comes down to what one considers success when it comes to these higher levels of course offerings. I have researched this topic endlessly these past two years, reading various studies and the various philosophies, as is what I have done with all topics that were to come before the Committee, and what I have concluded is that students do their best when challenged up to a certain point of their ability. Once you go past that level you hurt the students in numerous ways. In fact, here is an excerpt from a N.Y. Times article on this subject:

“Indeed, this report brings up important questions about “equity or excellence”. The US education system is on a very slippery slope. The US already suffers from a “brain drain” due to attempts to equalize education. While it is certainly important to improve the basic education of poorly performing students, it is very short-sighted not to maintain and improve educational opportunities that promote further excellence in the best students, without diluting them with average students. Face it, most students ARE average – it’s simply a mathematical truth. By relaxing the requirements for AP course participation, the school systems are doing even more of a disservice to the future of our country. What happened to producing the “best and the brightest”? It seems that we are promoting the “entitled and the self-important”? The latter certainly won’t take the US successfully into the next century.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I am very much a supporter of having higher levels of course offerings, including Advanced Placement. My concern has to do with this not so veiled scheme to do away with Honors classes taking our high school down to a two tiered system of just the regular education and college level, without the middle level. So why am I so concerned?

Well again I think it is very important for people to understand that Advanced Placement is college level. Think back to when you were in high school. Would you have been ready for college classes in 10th grade?  How about 11th grade? For many even in 12th grade you would not have been ready for college level classes. For many, attempting to take college level coursework when not truly ready would lead to either having to work so hard in order to keep up that it would negatively affect other coursework, or too much, unneeded levels of stress.

First of all we can’t change the basic level of course offering, which as explained above is called college preparatory. For many students that is the level of what they will be able to handle. And if Advanced Placement is truly supposed to be college level then I think any reasonable person would agree that most students are not ready for it. So what about the students who want to challenge themselves, want to show colleges that they are working at a higher level, but aren’t ready for college courses just yet? These students, which should be a good percentage, need that middle level of Honors.

As I am already on page three, having probably lost a couple of readers by page two, I’ll stop here and make this a multi-part discussion.  Next time I will be looking at the data to back up my concerns.  But to leave you with just one statistic to hold you over, last year the percentage of passing grades (3 or higher out of 5) was 55.9%.  Almost half of the exam grades were failing grades of 1 or 2.

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