Pair Crack AP Test Barrier

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 1, 2006

For the first time in four years, a student at Potomac High School in Prince George's County has passed an Advanced Placement test.

Two students, actually.

The school's feat -- two passing grades out of 55 AP tests, taken in the spring -- may not seem like much. But no one at the Oxon Hill school had passed one of the college-level exams since 2002. Last year, 59 of 60 tests taken at Potomac drew a score of 1, the lowest on the 5-point scale.

Christina Martinez, 16, still hasn't quite come to terms with the celebrity she earned by scoring a 3 on her AP English language test.

"All these teachers I've never met know my name," she said, speaking by telephone from her after-school job. "The vice principal hugged me one day."

AP, a curriculum that challenges high school students with college-level work, has become so pervasive in the region that many students and teachers take success for granted. Just 30 miles away, in the affluent suburb of Potomac, Winston Churchill High School produced 1,453 passing AP exams last year.

But each year, there are schools in Prince George's and the District that fail to yield a single passing score.

At the other Potomac, a campus just east of the Southeast Washington line, the news that two students had passed AP tests drew thunderous applause when it was announced at a staff meeting last week.

The school gave slightly fewer AP tests this year than last but had much better results: two exams earned a 3 and six more received a 2, a score considered worthy by the test publisher, the College Board.

The staff, and particularly the AP teachers, had worn a badge of shame the past three years. Although academicians say participation in rigorous course work is an end in itself, AP teachers largely measure success in terms of the pass rate on the exam that ends the course. A score of 3 is almost universally regarded as the cutoff; it is generally the lowest score required to earn college credit.

Christopher Budano, the school's testing coordinator, told Martinez and the other student -- whose name school officials did not release for privacy reasons -- how excited everyone was about their scores on the AP English language test. He suspects the gravity of the event escaped them.

"I don't believe they understand the ramifications that they have kicked open the ceiling on the test," he said yesterday.

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."