What is the College Board Thinking? Pt. 1
Giving full length AP exams this spring means poor kids get the shaft. Again.
This is part 1 of a two-parter that should not be a two-parter but writing is hard. Stay tuned for part 2 in the coming days.
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I’ll spare you the witty intro and deliver my thesis up top: the College Board is crazy to administer full-length AP exams this spring and this decision will disproportionately hurt low income students.
Even if you have only a vague notion of what an AP exam is, or haven’t thought about one since you sweated through “AP Bio” in high school, this matters in a larger sense because the College Board’s decision to go ahead with the exams despite everything that’s happened since Sir Tom Hanks told the world he got COVID last March is yet another instance of an institution not following through on their previous public commitments regarding longstanding inequalities and systemic racism in this country.
Earlier this year, the College Board stood at a fork in the road and for reasons that I cannot alone find baffling chose the path forward that will harm poor students, particularly those of color, who, due to the limitations of remote school that are obvious to anyone who has spent five minutes on Zoom and also the general havoc wreaked by the pandemic, have not had the same educational experience as their more affluent peers. So we’re marching them toward a high-stakes exam that through no fault of their own they will be ill-equipped for. And it didn’t have to be this way.
So what’s the College Board thinking?
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But first, a primer. Advanced Placement classes are college-level classes taught by high school teachers. There are almost 40 of them running the gamut (Music Theory, English Literature, Computer Science, etc.) and most schools at this point teach at least one or two. The standards and syllabi are created and approved by college professors from all over the country so as to insure their fidelity to entrance-level college courses and the classes, if taught correctly, are about as rigorous as you can get. They culminate in a murderous 3-hour exam each May that leaves even the most assured students desiccated and blind from the effort. Literally staggering from the testing rooms gasping. It’s adorable. They are, I think, among the most difficult exams high schoolers can take, and most adults I know -- with all due respect to most of the adults I know -- couldn’t pass them even if they were allowed to Google the answers or had Ken Jennings at gunpoint.
These tests are tough mothers! Almost 3 million high school students take them each year, with many students taking more than one. In June, thousands of nerdy teachers gather in a Nebraskan hotel for two weeks to grade the written portion of the exams for what seems to be like 23 hours a day. It’s supposed to be a semi-religious experience if you’re a teacher. I’m not joking.
Scores are released with great fanfare in July and if students score a 3 or higher (out of 5) that student gets college credit for that class and, more importantly, earns a bonafide on his/her transcript that signals to college admissions officers that he/she is ready for the rigors of a college curriculum. As far as standardized tests go, even a Montessori teacher would be hard pressed not to admit that they’re pretty good.
Now, for years, AP classes were mostly the domain of wealthy private schools and honors classes, but then the College Board, realizing this was a disgusting equity problem, worked very hard and very nobly to expand access to AP classes since, obviously, there were tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of students, particularly at poor rural and urban schools across the U.S., who could do well in such classes and would have benefited (arguably, more so) from scoring a 4 on AP U.S exam. Quick parenthetical: It speaks volumes that just as AP classes reached the favelas, the toniest private schools in D.C. decided AP exams were no longer good enough for their students and so dropped the courses claiming that because nearly 40% of high school students in the U.S. now take the exam it is therefore no longer true, as it was before, that only “exceptional students take [the exams].” That the rate of passing scores only grew with that expansion betrays the delusion so dearly held by the elite that they, through the dint of their talent and hard work alone, deserve their place on top of the pile. Lol. End parenthesis.
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I’m a big fan of the AP program, as I made known in a previous post, and I think AP classes are one of the best, most cost-effective school-level tools we have at closing the achievement gap.
Since 2003, the proportion of low-income students taking AP exams jumped from 9% to 22%. In real numbers, that is hundreds of thousands of previously excluded students sweating through arduous coursework. That is hundreds of thousands of students who are leaving high school with college credits under their belt or who, even if they didn’t pass the exam, then in the very least probably discovered a newfound confidence in what they are capable of, academically. And who knows how many of those kids are first-generation college students who hadn’t even considered college to be a possibility?
This is good, this is fair, this is equitable. A rising tide lifts all ships.
And hats off to the College Board for this social justice win.
So but then here’s my question: Why, then, after all that we know about the vastly different school experiences students had this year as determined by their family’s income and where they went to school and how hard their community was hit by the pandemic and if they had to babysit their siblings and if their parents lost their jobs and whether they were in school or remote and whether their teachers taught synchronous or asynchronous classes and if they were trying to type essays on a fucking smart phone, why, then, would the College Board insist on administering full-length, timed AP tests when it all but assures that a significant number of low-income students will underperform?
Like what the hell?
Are they crazy? Am I crazy?
I’ll try to answer these questions in part 2. Stay tuned.
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Photo credit: https://www.shorpy.com/files/images/5a23195u.jpg