AP Students Forced to Accept Less

A teacher with the sign-on name of pfelcher posted a provocative comment on the Web version of my Nov. 3 column for the Post's Metro section. I was repeating for the 4,897th time my view that even low-income students who have not performed well in school can learn in a college-level high school course, like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, if given extra time and encouragement.

Pfelcher would have none of my argument. To support his opinion, he cited a personal experience in his classroom. I always find first-person accounts helpful when debating this issue. I decided to send his comment to a few other AP teachers I knew, and see what they had to say.

Here is the post from pfelcher, whom I do not know and cannot identify further, followed by the reactions of three teachers, plus a student who sent me his view. If we want to make our high schools better, we have to work this out. I think such exchanges help us figure out what to do:

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From pfelcher:

Access and the inclusivity it implies is a nice but ridiculous notion. I would never allow someone who could not swim access to a deep swimming pool. Access to AP classes begins not the minute a child feels like walking into a class for which he is woefully unprepared, but in EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION.

Unfortunately, articles like this invariably focus only on the underachieving, semi-literate students who are told from day one that they can be whatever they want to be. These same students are never taught from Day One what it really takes to be whatever they want to be. These articles never focus on the capable students who have worked hard to try to wring some substance out of a usually pitiful public school education. These students are the ones brought down by this warm-fuzzy inclusivity.

Last year in my 11th grade AP English Language class, I had many of my own Honors 10th graders again and the previous year they had read about 10 books; they had written an annotated bibliography; they had read and written about texts from several of the major genres, eras and schools of thought. In addition to these students, I had several students from the larger public school community, who had read one or two books the entire previous year and who had barely written a thesis or complete argument.

It's not about who wins in a class of students with such disparate preparation and skill; it's about who loses. The students ready to march ahead are forced instead to grind to a halt as the other students have to be taught the basics with which they should have entered the class.

At the end of the year, those unprepared students who might have gained from my class but who still had too far to go to attain the literacy and competence the test requires, failed miserably on the AP exam. So, did these lower-end students gain from the experience? Yes, they did to some degree, even though egos that had never really been tried suffered when they saw how they compared to the nation.

Then there is the other question -- Did the kids who had worked hard to be prepared for the class gain from experience? NOT AS MUCH AS THEY HAD A RIGHT TO. Could we cover all I had hoped? Not by a long shot, since I had to review and re-teach all that should have been taught to my other students sooner.

So, yes, this kind of feel-good, everyone-can-do-it idea is valuable, but not at the expense of students who are not trying to game the system but who have worked solidly to learn and succeed. If we are serious about inclusivity we must adhere to the notion that ACCESS BEGINS IN KINDERGARTEN, not at the moment a child who has effectively been asleep in school for 11 years suddenly decides to wake up!