Should We Put the Brakes on Advanced Placement Growth?

What also gets missed in promoting AP as an open-access program is that higher failure rates inevitably tarnish the program and hurt at least some students in the classes. Here's a personal example. My daughter took several AP classes at her public high school. For most of the AP classes, admittance was restricted to better students. The courses were challenging. For one class she took, however, AP was open enrollment. According to my daughter, that had several consequences. First, many of the better students who had been in her other AP classes didn't bother to take that class. Second, the class was ordinary, like any other class in school. Third, and most disappointing to me, my daughter was completely turned off to the subject matter and never took a class in that field in college. Now, that might have happened anyway, but that is just one of many areas that need to be researched to decide whether AP expansion has unintended, malignant consequences.

Lots of people might feel that my daughter's experience is a small price to pay for giving other kids an opportunity to take AP. Many AP teachers can tell you a story about a student taking a lone AP course who received a 1 or a 2 on the AP exam. That student later bumps into that teacher and tells her how the AP experience nevertheless benefited him when he got to college. These anecdotes are uplifting, but they don't necessarily tell us the whole story. In psychology, kids learn about this method of uncritical thinking, which is called confirmation bias -- we look for information that confirms our preexisting beliefs and disregard evidence to the contrary. It's like a restaurant owner who concludes that she must be serving good food because that's what her survey of repeat customers concluded. Obviously, those one-time customers that weren't surveyed might have something other than high praise for our hypothetical restaurant.

Unless and until we get data about how failure impacts students who took AP, we don't really know whether our assumptions that "AP is good for everyone" are correct. Were some students so overwhelmed by the experience that they skipped college altogether? Did AP exam failure reinforce existing negative stereotypes? Has a student opted not to follow a particular career path because of a bad AP experience? How is open access affecting the teaching of AP? Are colleges becoming more concerned that the AP program is being watered down because they have begun receiving freshmen with lots of AP courses in history, for example, who don't know much about history?

These are just some questions we need to know more about before we conclude that increasing AP failure is benign.

Mathews: Your daughter's story is important, and sad, but we both know what the problem was: bad teaching. Bad teaching is nearly always the problem. Compare your daughter's experience with what we are seeing in Northern Virginia, where thousands of students are taking open enrollment AP and IB [International Baccalaureate] courses every year in all of the region's school districts. I am hearing almost no stories of bad teaching but plenty of stories of great teachers like you making these courses shine for all kinds of kids. I have watched many of those teachers in action. They explain to me that if you do not open AP to all students who want to take such a course, you sentence at least some motivated students to lower-level courses that are going to be, to them, torturously boring. That seems to them, as it does to me, to be pedagogical malpractice. Also, we have data indicating that the standard practice of limiting access to AP has missed the mark. A College Board study based on student PSAT scores indicates at least twice as many students are ready for AP as are actually enrolled in the courses.

There is also, I think, an important flaw in your original analysis. You emphasize the drop in the passing rate among students who take AP exam, but you fail to mention that at the same time the NUMBER of students, including minority students, who pass AP exams is increasing. Education reform happens one kid at a time. The expansion of AP, despite its challenges, is producing more kids who are succeeding in these college-level courses, and I think that is a more important development than the falling passing rate. More young people are realizing they have the stuff that will get them through college. That is a critically important insight for them.

Mattimore: I don't believe the problem is bad teaching. Just like I don't believe the problem at Abu Ghraib was a few bad apples. Teachers are part of a much larger system that includes factors such as the school's culture and, yes, the students with whom they are working. From 2005 to 2007, I taught at a first-rate high school, San Francisco's Saint Ignatius College Prep, in which eight of our 11 U.S. history classes were AP. Virtually all SI's graduates go on to four-year colleges. I had enormous resource support, and over 90 percent of my kids passed the AP exam. It's flattering of you to suggest that I might be a great teacher, but in fact I was in a great situation with stellar kids. Our other AP Psychology teacher, Eric Castro, the best teacher I ever saw, had a higher passing rate than I did. I was fortunate to be able to appropriate material from Eric by auditing his classes occasionally.

We taught at a college level because our students were prepared and expected to learn at a college level. When students come to an AP class unprepared or underprepared to learn, we shortchange other students who could prosper in AP, and we misrepresent AP to those universities that rely on AP designations to signify college-level competencies.

How different was my experience at a middle-of-the road public high school where I taught for many years. Although I had some successes, overall I was discouraged. I tried using a college textbook to teach psychology, but it was beyond the reading level of many of my students. I took several students to Stanford, where they made presentations in front of that faculty. Two of my students were subsequently recognized with plaques by Phil Zimbardo, the president of the American Psychological Association at that time. A third student received a prestigious book award from the distinguished psychologist Albert Bandura. But regrettably, for the majority of my students, and despite my best efforts, the kids were simply marking time. When I was in a superlative situation, I was a superlative teacher; when I was in a mediocre situation, I was a mediocre teacher.

Mathews: This is a terrific illustration of an important principle: A school works much better if leaders and teachers are all on the same page, working toward the same goal of raising every student's level of achievement. St. Ignatius was clearly that kind of school. The unnamed middle-of-the-road public high school was not. That takes me to my last, and I think most important, complaint about your suggestion that the College Board discourage high schools with low AP passing scores from giving so many AP courses and tests until they arrange for better teaching at the lower grades.

I applaud the intent of your suggestion. Many school systems do not set the standard for elementary and middle school as high as they should. That is an important reason why many high school students struggle in AP classes. But you have watched how school systems work long enough to know that blaming a high school's failure on low standards in the lower grades is a classic cop-out. It is indeed one of the most common reasons I hear for high schools not opening up AP to more students: "They just aren't ready for it."

It would be very nice if we had a culture where, in such cases, you could tell the elementary and middle school teachers and principals to get their act together and they would instantly change their ways and send to the high school in one or two years kids who WERE ready for AP. But in my experience, and in the experience of the AP teachers who have influenced me, that almost never happens. The middle school people have few incentives to raise their standards. If you place severe limits on entrance to the high school's AP program, you have removed one of the few selling points they have with their principal, their parents and their students. "Why should I try to get ready for AP?" the kids will say. "We know kids in the high school that were plenty smart, but they wouldn't let them in. That program is just for rich kids." Everyone can revert to the common excuse. Those kids just aren't up to it.