Should High Schools Bar Average Students From College-Level Courses and Tests?

Parents use the list to compare schools, exactly as I intended. That produces some useful insights, such as why there are so many schools with similar student bodies that do considerably better than many of the protesting schools.

New Canaan High, for example, has an AP participation rating of 1.230. That puts it in the top 5 percent of U.S. schools, but there are 120 schools in the D.C. area with better numbers. Langley High School in Fairfax County, with 7 percent low-income students, is demographically similar to New Canaan, where 2.4 percent of the students are low-income. Yet Langley's AP participation rate is 3.807, three times as large.

One important reason is that New Canaan, unlike Langley, prohibits students from taking AP courses if their grades in previous classes weren't good enough. It does not matter how much they want to take the course or how hard they are willing to work in it. Pavia, the New Canaan principal, said, "I do not believe that AP classes are for everyone any more than physics or band or ceramics or football is for everyone."

Washington area superintendents and principals have a different view. They think every student who wants to get a taste of college trauma in an AP or IB course ought to be able to do so. They tell me their open door to AP, IB and Cambridge courses raises expectations and inspires better instruction in lower grades. The number of students passing the exams remains very high, despite letting so many more students take them.

One of the Washington area superintendents who endorses that view is Morton Sherman of Alexandria. He also was one of the superintendents who signed last year's boycott letter to Newsweek, when he was superintendent of the Tenafly, N.J., schools. Sherman told me he does not like restrictions placed on AP enrollment like those used in New Canaan. In Alexandria, he is urging even more college-level course participation by introducing IB.

He just doesn't think I should be summing up schools with one number. "IB or AP by themselves do not give a complete picture of quality," he said. He was too busy this year to make an issue of it, he said, but will be getting back to me next year.

I can't wait.

E-mail: mathewsj@washpost.com.