Pair Crack AP Test Barrier

The school is improving in other academic areas as well, although it still ranks well below the state average. Proficiency on the High School Assessments, soon to be required for graduation in Maryland, rose from just 6.5 percent last year to 24.4 percent this year in algebra, and from 10.9 percent to 31 percent in biology. About two-thirds of students pass the tests statewide.

Potomac High serves a transient population in the communities of Oxon Hill and Temple Hills. Students arrive lacking many of the skills they will need to score well on AP tests, which usually call for long-form essays written in the established format of premise-argument-conclusion, teachers say. In an exam setting, it's not unusual for students to leave the essay pages blank.

Even when students do attempt to write, "they don't often write as much as they can, and they don't often write as much as they should," Budano said.

That the school's highest AP achievement should come in the junior English class is something of a miracle. The students had three teachers during the school year. The first left to join the Peace Corps. The second was a long-term substitute, unprepared for the brisk AP curriculum. The third, Imani Scott, took over just before the May testing date.

Scott had taught at Potomac High before. She knew that even in a class of advanced students, she would "have to start at the very beginning of the writing process. They'll just start writing, and then they'll get through two paragraphs and they'll say, 'I can't write any more.' They run out of ideas."

The school has nothing approaching the finely tuned AP machine of its peers in Montgomery and Fairfax counties. But teachers are trying to organize and coordinate their efforts. Budano and Scott worked with their students on writing down all their ideas on paper, the better to organize them on the page when they sit down to write.

John E. Deasy, the new schools chief, has set a goal of raising the system's AP effort by offering, at a minimum, eight core AP courses in every high school by next year.

At the start of her junior year at Potomac High, Martinez told her AP English teacher, the one about to join the Peace Corps, that she would pass the test. She felt no less confident when she completed the exam nine months later, even after dozing off between the multiple-choice section and the essay.

"I was the last one writing," she recalled. "I felt like it was really easy."

Teachers say Martinez's success could speak volumes to her classmates, who have never seen a student from Potomac reap any measurable benefit from an AP test. Most of them, Martinez said, sit down for the test presuming they will fail.

"What it does is," Scott said, "it enables us to raise the bar and raise the standards a little bit higher."