By Nelson Hernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 7, 2007
John E. Deasy, the superintendent of Prince George's County schools, issued a decree soon after taking charge a year ago: Each of the county's 22 high schools will offer at least eight Advanced Placement courses next year.
He got funding for the expansion, which would increase the number of students in the county taking AP courses by 25 percent. Now he just needs the teachers.
The effort to mobilize the teaching corps brought about 80 current and prospective AP teachers to Charles H. Flowers High School on a recent Saturday morning for a series of workshops in AP English, math, social studies and science. The workshops are run by the College Board, which administers the AP exams and recently announced that it will audit courses to ensure that they meet college standards.
"You can't just say to people, 'Get more kids in AP classes,' unless you have the teachers," Deasy said. He'll need as many as 200 certified to teach the advanced courses by the fall. As he walked from classroom to classroom, he added: "I can't hold you accountable for doing something without giving you the skills to do it."
In Montgomery and Fairfax counties, the average high school senior has taken at least two and often three or four Advanced Placement exams before graduating. In some schools in Prince George's, a student is lucky even to set foot inside a classroom of one of the college-level courses.
Deasy pins this inequality on a lack of opportunity. At Eleanor Roosevelt High School, nearly two dozen AP courses are offered; at many of the others, there are only a handful, sometimes as few as two.
In one of the Saturday workshops, 14 teachers read the poem "Opportunity," a short paean to the notion that people of spirit can create success even out of bad circumstances.
The class was dubbed "Pre-AP Strategies in English -- The Five-S Strategy for Passage Analysis." The instructor, a professor from the University of Pittsburgh named David Walton, wore a dress shirt and tie. His "students" slouched in jeans and polos while he took on the subject with dry humor.
"The College Board loves these initials," he told the class. "It's useful, but I confess that each time I do the workshop, I have to look back to see what the initials are." (The five S's stand for sentences, speaker, situation, shifts and syntax -- things to think about when reading.)
Although Walton called himself "an old cynic," he said: "It's a useful method, and it helps teachers. It gives teachers something to move from."
Deasy was pleased with what he saw: "The skills you gain in these are very good," he said.
AP courses, tough and easily compared across jurisdictions, are often used as a measure of how much a school is challenging its students. The teachers in the class backed their expansion, saying it would allow talented students to take tough courses no matter where in the county they went to school.
During a lunch break, teachers said they enjoyed the workshops and hoped that the lessons would give their students a good, all-purpose tool for appreciating literature. But they said they were also worried that they could be setting up students to fail by moving so fast.
"They've got to work out the kinks," said Charles Lippman, a teacher of AP courses in language and literature at High Point High School. He was worried that if there were no prerequisites for taking an AP course, some students would be unprepared. Some of the students at High Point, he said, were reading and writing at a fifth-grade level.
"You can't raise that," he said solemnly.
Kelly Price, who teaches AP language and literature at Bowie High School, stopped grading a pile of essays and broke into the conversation.
"They've got to make that middle school connection," she said. Deasy said the school system is doing that in math, where some eighth-graders are taking high school-level algebra successfully. But English composition is still a problem, Price said. In their essays, struggling students often use memorized vocabulary terms clumsily instead of grappling with the text.
Lippman and Price gave made-up examples from their students' essays: "Faulkner is a very good user of literary devices." "Shakespeare is a good author." Then there was the rigor of the pieces they were reading, which would try an adult's patience and understanding.
"You have to do very challenging pieces," Price said, "but it makes them feel dumb. They really should not feel bad if they don't pass the exam. . . . You can't wreck them. You've got to give them a little boost."
The crucial boost might come in another form, the teachers said: simply surviving an AP course.
Lippman told the story of a girl he'd had in one of his AP English classes, whom he encountered after she had graduated.
"She didn't score great on the test," he said. "Or even the class. She wasn't exceptional. But she was ready for college."
The girl had gotten an A in her college freshman English course.
"That's a confirmation, much more to me, than how many people passed your test," he said.
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