Italian American Groups Speak Up to Save AP Language Test

The Italian government and prominent Italian American groups lobbied to create the Italian AP exam and put up $500,000 to subsidize it. The governments of China and Japan, too, subsidized the recent creation of AP tests in those languages. Too few students take the $84 tests to yield a profit, but each of the new exams has raised the currency of the college preparatory organization while serving the interests of the foreign governments in promoting their language and culture.

"It is something that is prestigious for us, but also for them," said Marco Mancini, first counselor for consular, justice and home affairs at the Italian Embassy.

The first AP Italian tests were given in 2006. Participation topped 2,000 this year, but proponents have struggled to build a pipeline of students sufficiently prepared for the exam, which requires the equivalent of about five years' high school study.

As they announced cuts in April, College Board officials made clear their concern with the Italian course was purely financial. In May, Ambassador Castellaneta met with the College Board's president, Gaston Caperton. In June, the two parties announced that a task force had been formed to raise funds in hope to save the course.

Embassy officials say they have not yet been told how much money will be needed; they expect to find out later this month. The funds must be collected by October to save the test beyond 2009.

"They made very clear that they wished to sustain AP Italian," Mancini said. "But they made very clear that they would need money to do this."

Protest has risen in all four academic fields that stand to lose tests. Teachers say they were left out of the decision-making process. They say the exams are being eliminated too quickly for thousands of students across the country who had planned to take them in two to three years.

"There is more anger than you can possibly imagine among secondary teachers," said Ronnie Ancona, a professor of classics at Hunter College in New York, speaking for Latin teachers.

College Board officials said they hope to save the AP Italian test. The board plans to eliminate the other three but said it plans to refine and improve remaining tests in those subjects.

"Very few students were preparing to take the discontinued AP courses and exams, and in each case those students still have one capstone AP exam in that discipline available to them," Jen Topiel, College Board spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

The retrenchment affects a small but significant number of students at some of the region's most prestigious high schools.

Montgomery County had 23 students engaged in AP study of Latin literature and Virgil in the last academic year at two schools, Walter Johnson in Bethesda and Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring. Forty-seven students at seven Montgomery schools took AP French literature.

At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, a selective Northern Virginia public school, 25 students took AP French literature in 2007-08, and as many as 75 students are expected to take AP Latin literature in fall.

No one in either school system took AP Italian this year, although embassy officials say a few dozen students took the exam privately. But teachers say that an increase in participation is just a matter of time.