Advanced Placement Courses Worth It for Teen Mother
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 30, 2005
Deeannah Taylor sprinted from the senior parking lot to the red brick administration building at Glen Burnie High School for her 12 p.m. Advanced Placement physics exam. She arrived, breathless, at 12:02. The counselor asked whether she needed a few minutes to cool down. Deeannah shook her head no.
She sat down, took a breath and put the events of the previous six hours behind her -- the pre-dawn study session, the trip to the pediatrician with her 15-month-old daughter, the desperate dash to school.
This 17-year-old mother is the new face of Advanced Placement in the Washington region.
The Anne Arundel school system has doubled participation in the AP program in three years, filling classrooms with a new generation of AP scholars: smart students with checkered academic pasts; working-class teens who will be the first in their families to go to college; youths like Deeannah, with adult-sized concerns. The pattern repeats across the Washington suburbs.
"I feel like I work harder this year. I'm motivated," said Deeannah, a senior whose class schedule includes AP courses in physics, psychology, statistics, Spanish and English literature.
A few years ago, a student such as Deeannah would have been discouraged from AP study, which challenges high school students with college-level work.
Once the province of an academic elite, AP courses were offered to small groups of students handpicked by their teachers. Glen Burnie High, for example, required students to fill out an application and complete a sample assignment to be considered for admission. The process yielded a crop of mostly white students from upper-income families.
On the theory that more students could benefit from advanced courses, school systems in the region have opened the floodgates, actively recruiting promising students, breaking down admission barriers and offering classes on AP study skills.
Critics say AP classes have become crowded, noisy and undisciplined. They cite falling pass rates on AP exams as evidence of eroding standards. Defenders, including Anne Arundel Superintendent Eric J. Smith, contend that even a middling AP student is better off for having taken the courses.
"Public education is in one business, and that's to open doors for children," Smith said. "It's why we're here."
Glen Burnie is a working-class Baltimore suburb. The high school's senior parking lot is filled with new cars bought with student wages from night and weekend jobs. Barely 80 percent of students will finish Glen Burnie High, and only one in four of those will attend a four-year college. Deeannah works weekends at a Bob Evans restaurant in Pasadena. Her pay goes to diapers and day care.
She spent Mother's Day waiting tables, working with a migraine and a sore throat and fever she had picked up from her daughter, Jamara. The manager gave her and the other mothers white flowers to wear on their aprons.
During the week, Deeannah gets up at 5:30 each morning and wakes Jamara about 6. She changes, dresses and feeds the baby, hustles her off to day care and then gets to school, where classes start at 7:17.
Deeannah's schedule -- six classes, no electives -- allows her to leave school at lunchtime and gives her three hours to do her homework before she picks up Jamara, whom she has trained not to touch her school papers.
"As long as I really sit down and get focused, it's plenty of time," she said.
Deeannah grew up the second of four children in a button-down home. Her father, James, spent 27 years in the Coast Guard, maintaining cutters. Her mother, Dorinda, is a secretary and part-time real estate agent. No one left the Taylor home unless their homework was done. The children were allowed to have friends, but not necessarily boyfriends.
Jamara was due in the middle of Deeannah's junior year. She hid her pregnancy beneath baggy clothes until well into her seventh month, weighing abortion or adoption, frightened of angering her parents and alienating her classmates. At a sleepover party for her friend's 16th birthday, she never took off her coat.
She finally confided in her mother the day before the family went in for flu shots. Deeannah was afraid the inoculation might hurt her unborn child.
Sitting on a couch with her mother at the real estate office, Deeannah wrote the message, "I have to tell you something. . . . " on a sheet of paper and handed it to her. Deeannah began to cry.
She showed her mother the tummy she had been hiding.
"We just both sat there, and I held her," Dorinda Taylor said.
Deeannah had been a B student taking second-tier classes until her junior year, when with her counselor, she decided on a more challenging schedule. She has taken seven AP courses since then, the bulk of them in her senior year as a teenage mother. Her most recent report card came back with four A's, a B and a C.
"She was never the best raw talent in my class, but she's always been the hardest worker in my class," said Michael Willis, her AP physics teacher. "She has a lot of drive. She could really get somewhere."
Dropping out, Deeannah said, "didn't seem smart to me."
She said it was clear that there "wasn't going to be a strong relationship" with Jamara's father, "so I knew I had to make the best decision for myself. The mind-set I've had since the day I found out is that the best thing for us is for me to finish college."
Deeannah stayed home after giving birth and was home-schooled almost to the end of her junior year. Willis made regular visits to her home, because the course work wasn't covered by the home educators. His trips enabled her to progress to his AP class this year.
Deeannah's family cared for Jamara this year while Deeannah played volleyball and rehearsed for the school's spring production of "Footloose."
Most of the time, though, Deeannah and Jamara travel together. She takes her daughter along to study groups and on outings with friends to the Arundel Mills mall.
In the fall, Deeannah plans to pack up Jamara and drive to Frostburg State University, 150 miles away in western Maryland. She'll do this over the objections of her mother, who would prefer that she stay home and commute to college or, if she must go to Frostburg, that she leave Jamara behind.
"I try to look out for her; I'm looking out for her and my granddaughter," Dorinda Taylor said. "She has no idea of what's ahead of her. It's going to be real hard."