Fairfax Student AP Results Among Top in U.S.

High school students in Fairfax County have achieved some of the nation's best results in college-level courses, with nearly two out of five earning a passing score on an Advanced Placement exam, according to data from the College Board and the school district.

Other Northern Virginia districts -- including Arlington, Prince William and Loudoun counties and Falls Church -- have also outstripped their counterparts nationwide in drawing students into the rigorous course work and helping them pass the tests that can bring college credit at many universities.

Officials with Montgomery schools, which showed comparable gains to Fairfax's, provided an analysis showing gains over the past four years, with the rate of students passing at least one AP test increasing more than 36 percent. That success rate climbed 80 percent for African American seniors and 51 percent for Hispanic students in a time frame when more minority students were taking the tests.

Montgomery School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast attributed the improvement to his county's efforts to bring more ninth-graders into courses that prepare them for college-level work and efforts to improve training and selection of instructors.

Rather than waiting for students to apply, Weast said, Montgomery high school counselors examine the records of incoming freshmen, looking for test scores that show academic promise. "I am trying to catch you doing something right," he said.

Officials with Fairfax schools could not immediately provide a comparable analysis but said the school district, too, has taken steps to improve teacher training and draw more students into both the AP and International Baccalaureate college-level programs.

"We have been working since 1998 on changing our culture of AP and IB to a coaching and mentoring atmosphere," said Bernadette Glaze, the county's specialist for advanced academic programs. She said teachers try to help all students succeed, "rather than the top-down, 'gotcha' atmosphere" of using college-level courses to weed out students struggling with the work.

Glaze said the county School Board's decision to become one of the first districts in the country to pay AP test fees also helped encourage more students to participate.

The success of each school district was measured by a figure sometimes called the mastery rate or, simply put, the percentage of all seniors, even those not taking AP classes, who achieve at some time during high school a grade of 3 on the five-point AP test, written and scored by outside experts. The IB mastery rate uses scores of at least 4 on a seven-point test.

Montgomery recorded a 39.4 percent mastery rate, which climbs to 46 percent when students taking IB exams are included. Fairfax, the area's largest school district and, like Montgomery, one of the most affluent in the country, registered a 37 percent rate, or 46 percent with IB tests. That compares with 13 percent nationwide for AP tests.

Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school, had the nation's top mastery rate in eight AP subjects, and Montgomery's Winston Churchill High School had the top rate in one, the data shows.

Among African American students, 10.4 percent in Fairfax and 14.6 percent in Montgomery passed at least one AP test. But Weast pointed out that Montgomery's rate was only 8.1 percent in 2000.

For Hispanics, the mastery rate was 23.9 percent in Fairfax and 23.4 percent in Montgomery, up from 15.5 percent in Montgomery in 2000.

The Falls Church district, which had only 147 seniors last year, earned the highest rate in the region, with a mastery rate of 59 percent for IB. Prince William County officials say their rate was 34 percent with AP, IB and a third program, the Cambridge tests, included. Loudoun County's AP rate was 26 percent.

Arlington County calculated its rate at about 32 percent, including AP and IB. Howard County's AP rate was 20 percent, as was Anne Arundel's, although officials there said they expected the figure to rise when they included earlier scores.

Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School did not provide a mastery rate, but officials witnessed an 11 percent increase in AP participation in the current school year. In the past two years, AP enrollment increased by 42 percent for African American students and 55 percent for Latinos, a school report said.

Arlington's Wakefield High School has created what it calls a Cohort program, in which small groups of male students, most of them African American or Hispanic, meet regularly to discuss with advisers how to handle the most challenging courses. The school has one of the highest AP participation rates in the country.

Kwame Kutten, a senior at Gaithersburg High School, was part of Montgomery's AP success in 2004. He said he had never heard of AP when he started high school and learned it was "very hard." But his AP biology teacher was very helpful, he said, and the course turned out "not to be as hard as I thought." He received a 4 on his test.

Previously, the College Board and local school districts calculated success by counting the percentage of tests that had received passing grades. But College Board officials, as well as many educators in the Washington region, said they preferred the new rate because it takes into account how many students do well on the tests -- encouraging schools to coax more students into the classes.

The Washington Post annually calculates a Challenge Index rating for local high schools, based on test-taking rates without considering the scores. Several studies show that students appear to increase their chances of graduating from college if they try AP or IB courses in high school, and the effect is particularly strong if they do well.

Gerald W. Bracey, an educational psychologist at George Mason University, said he had some concerns about the mastery rate assessment, because it gave as much weight to a student who passed just one AP test as a student who passed two or three. He also said it was a bad idea to judge high school success solely on AP or IB results.