Apr 9, 2007
Posted | 5 comments
I use Google Alerts to monitor certain topics. I’ve specified that all news articles and blog posts with the phrases “AP” or “Advanced Placement” be sent my way over the last few weeks. The results show that the AP audit is a hotly-debated topic with a vast number of concerns - and very few proposed solutions.
Reader comments to my previous posts about the AP curriculum [located here and here] bring up some points worth addressing regarding the state of Advanced Placement. The College Board’s audit has renewed discussion about the AP’s purpose, delivery and effects; we shouldn’t waste the opportunity. I’d like to lay out two reader comments separately and then address them together.
JMoon points out the common-sense (but underpublicized) reason for the audit: The College Board wants to make sure classes, teachers and schools who use the AP moniker fall in line with the AP mission, its execution, and also its funds. This is a necessary requirement of all franchises. Your local Burger King faces periodic inspections to determine whether it’s worthy of using Burger King’s corporate resources. If the College Board can do this and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of instruction in the process, even better. JMoon says:
“… [A]lthough I agree with you in terms of increasing accountability, what do you think of adding a component that compares a student’s test score with the class grade? The problem is when a student manages an A in the class and can’t earn a 5, or even a 4.”
The Science Goddess tells us that not every student takes AP courses to get college credit. She accurately sums up the motivations of a significant block of students and exposes with subtlety an important underlying point: not every college accepts AP credit, and since students don’t know exactly where they’re headed until their last April of high school, they can’t count on college credit as a guaranteed benefit of an AP course. She also shares her experience as an AP reader:
“I don’t think that requiring all kids to take the test will say anything about the rigor of the class. As a Reader, I saw hundreds of test booklets each year that kids either left blank or wrote a lot of junk in—complaining how they were forced to take the test. I’m sure that the average score for their teachers suffered, but that doesn’t really give an accurate picture of how they ran their class or their qualifications to teach it.”
The theme here is defining and measuring the AP curriculum.
The College Board, as I wrote in an earlier post, is taking the right first step. Auditing syllabi will pluck a few rotten apples out of the barrel and delineate the AP curriculum so an AP course can resemble more closely its college-level counterparts. It also makes teachers with dubious syllabi [and presumably those with dubious skills] accountable and shows them that they need to seek help from peers or outside bodies to refine their course content and methods. Districts all over the country should encourage teachers to address their weaknesses and provide appropriate solutions/help for their staff. Will they? We’ll see over the next few months.
Objections to using AP exam performance to measure a teacher’s quality stems from a difference in philosophy about what testing means. Exams are designed to be a certification of a student’s knowledge. The ultimate measure of a teacher is their students’ performance, much like a company is only as good as the quality and customer satisfaction of the products they make. This doesn’t mean that a class needs to pull a collective 5 on an AP exam to show they were taught well, and it doesn’t mean that a class average of 2 means they were taught poorly. [n.b. : Just think of Joe Girardi, who was awarded National League Manager of the Year in 2006 for finishing with a 78-84 record managing a team with baseball's lowest payroll and questionable talent. Girardi's sub-.500 performance looks lackluster, but given the circumstances he engineered an incredible success.]
There’s no hope of creating a truly comprehensive measure of a student’s achievements in an AP course. There are simply too many hands in the pot; the district, the state, the federal government, the College Board, etc. all have a say [directly or indirectly] in how a student is measured. Without a broad standardized grading process - a logistical impossibility at this point - we can’t combine in a meaningful [and fair or accurate] way subjective elements like course grades with the AP exam score. If we tried, the problems we face with current grade inflation would be exacerbated.
That means we necessarily have to rely on the exam as a measure of achievement. This includes the students who blow off their AP exam for any of a host of reasons, as The Science Goddess has pointed out. If a student doesn’t take the exam seriously, the teacher has failed.
Again: If a student doesn’t take the exam seriously, the teacher has failed.
A teacher can’t guarantee that every student will try their best on their exam, but almost all of them should. There will be a few token failures generated from apathy and that can’t be avoided. If a significant percentage of a teacher’s students don’t approach the exam with the seriousness of purpose it warrants, with a commitment to demonstrating their achievement and being accountable for that demonstration, that teacher has failed to impress upon his students the meaning of the exam.
Think it sounds harsh? Consider a football or basketball game - or any high school sport, team or individual. If a significant portion of a team doesn’t try at all and shows a selfish disdain for the event, how long does their coach keep his job? He will be dismissed, rightly, with all deliberate speed, because he has failed to impart a sense of purpose on his athletes. From chemistry to tennis, the issues of relevance and import are the same. Requiring every student to take the test will tell you nearly everything about the classroom environment in which they learned. How they perform on that test will tell you the rest about the degree to which they have mastered the skills set out in the curriculum.
Teachers and districts as a whole won’t have the will to mandate that AP students take their exams, either with policy or forging a financial solution. We’re nearing the need for a classification of AP students to separate those who choose to integrate accountability and evaluation into their purpose for taking the class and those who essentially will audit the course but receive a grade at the local level. There’s a difference between those two types of students - and it’s a big one.
I’ll address funding the AP exam [and several other Advanced Placement issues] over the course of these coming weeks. If you’d like to stay on top of this debate, you can subscribe to the e-mail newsletter in the left column [or at the bottom of this post] or subscribe to RSS feeds through the links that are also on the left column.
UPDATE at 04/09/07, 8.35pm:
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post gives some pertinent insight in Finding the Best Schools, Part III: High-Income Blahs. He nails the analysis on how too many AP teachers generate student indifference toward the AP curriculum when it ought to be - and easily could be - an exciting and challenging component to education. Mathews’ piece is a must-read. Here’s an excerpt:
Most high schools still treat AP as if it were nothing more than an impressive credential to add to the resumes and college applications of top students. This produces a lethargy, a case of the academic blahs, in the rest of the student body. Without knowing it, high school officials in these cases are saying to average students: “We know you are going to college. We can’t stop you from going to college. But we can and will keep you from taking courses and tests that will prepare you for college.”
“Part IV: Rationing AP” echoes with plenty of data many of the points I’ve written about over the last few weeks - take a look.
UPDATE at 04/10/07, 1.17pm:
Make sure you read Mathews’ new piece, Part V: Grade Grubbing.
Apr 9, 2007
Posted | 0 comments
I came across an important and well-written piece on www.insidehighered.com titled “When A Student Dies.” It examines how a college or university should handle a student’s death and includes testimony from colleges about how to handle tragedy compassionately and legally. Elizabeth Redden writes:
In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, the experts agree: The family comes first. Honoring the family’s wishes proves to be absolutely paramount, says Willie H. Marshall, associate provost for student services and dean of students at Texas Southern University. For instance, he says university leaders should know a family’s wishes before deciding whether to send an e-mail about the death to all students, or to take a more targeted approach in alerting various segments of the campus body. “We make contact with the family and so forth. We always like to know the kinds of things that can be done,†Marshall says, adding that, for instance, many families place great value on a posthumously-awarded degree or even something so simple as obtaining a copy of their child’s transcript. “These are mementos.â€
She also links to Penn State’s “Student Affairs Guidelines for Reporting Student Deaths.”
Ms. Redden has written a must-read piece. You can read it all here.
For first-time readers, I wrote recently about the mishandling of a recent tragedy at SUNY Oneonta: “SUNY President Mishandles Crisis”: Part I, Part II and Part III. It is encouraging to see that decorum and dignity are on the minds of others.
Apr 4, 2007
Posted | 2 comments
The 113th Carnival of Education, hosted this week by Getting Green, has on its roster some of the week’s best education articles from the blogosphere.
This week’s All-Star Team:
- Buckhorn Road comments on the United Kingdom’s wholesale order of kid gloves for their history teachers [He's also linked to the original Dept. of Education and Skills report, if you haven't seen it].
- HUNBlog talks about whether to ground kids’ imaginations in reality or encourage their minds to run wild. His solution makes sense.
- Right Wing Nation educates teachers on how they can use basic statistics to evaluate and improve their teaching. Please, teachers: read this post. I’m begging you.
- Scheiss Weekly compares the Goofuses to the Gallants in a normal, everyday setting. It won’t be hard to draw parallels with our schools.
- Scenes From the Battleground tells us how effective education would be for his students “If Only They Didn’t Have to Learn.” [nota bene: I wish his cheek a speedy recovery; I believe his tongue busted through it while writing the post].
You can read the full Carnival here, including my submission about evaluating the Advanced Placement system.
A note from the Wonks, who will host next week’s Carnival:
Next week, The Carnival comes home to The Education Wonks. The deadline for submissions is: 9:00 PM (Eastern) 6:00 PM (Pacific) Tuesday, April 10th. Submissions may be sent to: owlshome [at] earthlink [dot] net . Contributors may also use Blog Carnival’s handy submission form.
If you’re interested in some other good stuff [not just education], you can see the best of what I’ve read this week by going to my del.icio.us.
Apr 3, 2007
Posted | 3 comments
Last week I wrote an article that explained an innovative program to give merit pay to students who take and pass Advanced Placement exams. This week’s issue isn’t the tests, it’s the curricula.
In “To Be Advanced Placement, Courses Must Pass Muster,” Daniel De Vise of the Washington Post reports on the College Board’s decision to audit the syllabi of 130,000 AP teachers to judge whether their classes are worthy of the AP distinction [read it through the Bradenton Herald]:
An explosion in AP study - participation in the program has nearly doubled this decade - has bred worry, particularly among college leaders, of a decline in the rigor for which the courses are known. Once the exclusive province of elite students at select high schools, AP study or its equivalent is now more or less expected of any student who aspires to attend even a marginally selective college.
In the haste to remain competitive in the AP arms race, schools sometimes award the designation to courses that barely resemble the college curriculum the program is meant to deliver, according to College Board officials and educators. Until now, there has been no large-scale effort to weed out such abuse.
As I wrote last week, an Advanced Placement course is designed to deliver college-level material to students who have the ability to handle it. This means teachers must have the knowledge and ability to teach it, which isn’t always the case. Reviewing syllabi is the College Board’s first line of defense in identifying and eliminating this problem.
Until now, the AP has only encouraged compliance with the few standards it’s set out for curriculum. Teachers are, of course, whining, especially the ones who haven’t ever prepared a real syllabus for their course:
The task has been met with no small amount of grumbling. But many faculty begrudgingly accept that some quality control is needed, lest the AP program spiral out of control.
Too late. Most of our AP darlings are woefully unprepared for college work (I won’t digress; if you think I’m wrong, just call up a professor at your local competitive-admissions college and ask). That means those AP courses with which they saturated their high school schedules just aren’t the same as a standard college class. Remember that taking an AP class is very different than taking an AP class and passing the test.
The teachers who churn out 4′s and 5′s from the majority of their students won’t have any trouble with this process. They’ve got syllabi and those syllabi (and methods) are adequate. That’s why their kids are getting excellent scores. The teachers who generate a class full of 1′s and no-shows are starting to sweat. They either have to gird their loins and start being real AP teachers or they’ll have to explain to students, colleagues and administrators why they aren’t teaching AP next year. The only two explanations are “My syllabus was rejected” or “I never submitted one.” I wouldn’t want to admit either.
This effort, while deserving praise, can only accomplish so much. Syllabi aren’t hard to write - even for the flaky, inadequate teacher. There is nothing stopping a teacher from spending a weekend on creating the syllabus without any intention of following it through for the 40 weeks of the following year. There are plenty of examples of excellent syllabi online, too. If the College Board cross-checks submissions with MIT’s OpenCourseWare site [that I wrote about here] for one, I’m sure they’ll spot a few opportunists. That’s where I’d go to cheat.
This is the equivalent of the written portion of that Driver’s License test you took when you were 16. You go through the motions, but it’s not much more than a hassle. And even though you put the right answer down for that question about the speed limit, you may or may not follow it in a few weeks.
The real measure of quality isn’t in the syllabus, it’s in the results. If your students average a 1.5 on the exam, you’re not teaching an AP course [or your kids can't handle it, which means you and the guidance counselors are at fault for letting them in]. If the College Board wants to judge the effectiveness of every AP course, they wil limplement a comprehensive system that includes the following:
- Having a designated representative in each District evaluate AP teachers periodically;
- Continuing to review teaching material/syllabi;
- Evaluating students’ grades on the AP exam for that class;
- Requiring professional development in the subject areas in which a teacher offers an AP course.
The first real step in AP quality control will be when the College Board denies use of the name “Advanced Placement” to any school who doesn’t require all students in AP courses to take the corresponding test in May.
UPDATE at 4/4/07, at 8.50am:
Jeffrey Solochek of the St. Petersburg Times has written a solid article on this topic that includes some reactions from teachers and administrators. Be sure to check out his blog: The Gradebook: Your Daily Report on Education News.
