Too Inconvenient And Too Costly

Private schools have been complaining about the growing influence of Advanced Placement and its effect on their programs. Joan Goodman, a school administrator and AP coordinator at The New School of Northern Virginia, was asked to give her opinion on the new AP course audit:

The New School doesn't have a problem with the audit per se, but we do have a problem with the College Board "recommending" that AP teachers take their workshops, because they do not make it convenient or affordable for teachers to attend.

A case in point: I registered our AP teachers for workshops at American University on Oct. 31. Two weeks before the workshops, I got an e-mail saying all the workshops had been canceled because of low registration. I wrote back, protesting the fact that their upcoming audit form strongly suggests that teachers take the workshops, and then they pull the rug out. I told them I felt they should honor their commitment to the teachers who did enroll, but they declined to do so.

Those workshops were the closest geographically, the best-timed and the most affordable I had come across. One teacher drove up to New York for a workshop in AP Human Geography, because he had a friend he could stay with in the city and workshops in that subject area are few and far between.

The College Board doesn't seem to understand that small, private schools don't have the funds to fly teachers off to their expensive workshops in other cities.