How Much Is Too Much?

Parents Worry About Increased Emphasis on Advanced Courses

The more the number of college-level courses in the Montgomery County schools grows, the stronger the feelings, both good and bad, parents have about them, according to an informal Washington Post survey.

Laurie Pfeifer, who has two children at Richard Montgomery High School, said its college-level course teachers are handling "a subject they know well and love, and the students are listening." Nanci Carstens, whose son has begun college-level courses at Sherwood High School, said the workload is robbing him of the enjoyment of high school. "I am very concerned with this whole mentality of overachievement," she said. "How did we get to this point?"

The clash of opinions comes as Montgomery County, according to The Post's annual Challenge Index high school list, takes one of the biggest jumps in college-level course participation in the area, up 19.8 percent since last year. The county is once again one of the few large counties in the country to have all of its high schools reach the Challenge Index benchmark of having at least as many college-level tests as graduating seniors.

Frederick County increased its college-level course participation 16.8 percent. For the first time, all of its high schools, including the new Tuscarora High, reached the benchmark.

Parents shared their opinions about the college-level courses in about 50 e-mails sent to The Post.

Many educators applaud the increased offering of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses and tests, saying they give more students a chance to get ready for college. But the strain of taking such courses in Montgomery County has been dramatized in a new book, "The Overachievers," by Whitman High School graduate Alexandra Robbins. One of the Whitman students she profiled said his mother insisted he take every available AP course, whether he liked it or not.

Cate Frazier-Neely, with a son who completed Einstein High School's IB program and a daughter still in it, said she shared Robbins's concerns.

"It takes a lot of guts for a parent in this county to encourage a lighter academic load and then provide opportunities for outside exploration or show, by way of example, that there is more to life than acquisition, work for work's sake or status-climbing," she said.

The supercharged AP and IB programs in Montgomery County have placed it fifth out of 28 Washington area school districts in its overall Challenge Index rating. Three county schools, Richard Montgomery (No. 2), Wootton (No. 4) and Bethesda-Chevy Chase (No. 6), are in the top 10 of the list of 184 high schools.

Elisa Walker, a first-year student at the University of Mary Washington, said she was happy she took the IB courses at Richard Montgomery because "I'm used to the workload and especially the level of work expected by college professors. I've found college to be much easier than IB."

But Margaret Engel, a Bethesda-Chevy Chase parent, said she thought counselors were pushing too many students into AP classes just to look good on the Challenge Index. In one case, she said, a student with reading difficulties suffered "the agony of an accelerated class where she was always 'the slow and the dumb one,' in her words."

At Damascus High, educators adopted an unusual program for the many students who cannot be tempted to try AP but have a desire to go to community college. Any student may take the Accuplacer test, a measure of English and math achievement that may indicate whether the student is ready for college work.

Susan O'Brien, an English teacher who serves as Montgomery College coordinator at Damascus, said many students and parents "are under the false impression that if they show up at a Montgomery College campus that they are in college." Instead of taking costly remedial courses at Montgomery College that earn them no credit, students who do poorly on the Accuplacer can use their remaining time in high school to build up their skills.

The AP program, created by the College Board in 1955, and the IB program, begun in the late 1960s by international school teachers in Switzerland, were designed for the most exclusive and high-performing public and private high schools. The idea was that if students could pass tests in high school comparable to final exams in college introductory courses, they could save time and money by skipping those courses when they got to college. The IB program was also designed to give students living outside their home countries an exam that would qualify them for entrance to colleges all over the world.

In the 1980s, AP and IB teachers in the United States began to experiment with giving AP courses and tests to average students in average, and in some cases below-average, schools. The successes, such as Jaime Escalante's AP calculus course for low-income students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, persuaded more schools to adopt AP and IB.

Two large studies in California and Texas show that good scores on AP tests correlate with second-year college success or higher college graduation rates. But some scholars say this could be because of the character of the students who do well in AP, not because of the AP experience. Other educators say AP and IB provide a vital taste of college trauma in high school that makes it more likely students will earn their college degrees.

In the Washington area, Fairfax County raised AP test taking to a new level in 1998 by announcing it would pay the test fees for students taking AP courses, as it was already doing for IB students. The number of AP tests in the county jumped 71 percent in a single year, and many other districts, including Arlington and Alexandria, adopted the same policy, although Montgomery and Frederick counties have not.

Some educators have complained that the Challenge Index list does not show how well students did on the exams. A new statistic, the Equity and Excellence rate, has been added to show which schools had the highest percentage of seniors passing at least one AP or IB test before graduation.

The top 10 schools on that scale on the new list are Clarke County (74 percent), Langley in Fairfax County (72 percent), George Mason in Falls Church (71 percent), Churchill (70.4 percent), Whitman (70.2 percent), Wootton (69.5 percent), H-B Woodlawn in Arlington County (69 percent), McLean in Fairfax County (67 percent), Bethesda-Chevy Chase (64.2 percent) and Yorktown in Arlington County (62.3 percent).