When I read the first page of this article, the headline I was going to use was “Our kids are pushing past the status quo”.
(washingtonpost.com) “Montgomery County public schools this year passed a milestone in college preparation: Half of the 9,737 black high school students are enrolled in honors or Advanced Placement courses.
Five years ago, barely one-third of African Americans participated in such classes, despite the county’s reputation as a national leader in college prep. Now, a black student in Montgomery is more likely to take an AP test than a white student elsewhere in the nation.” (more…)
Then when I read the second half, my excitement somewhat sank because it appears that standards were once again LOWERED.
In previous decades, AP was mostly the province of a small coterie identified by their teachers as capable of college-level work. The program’s elitism “was a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Christopher Berry, an assistant principal at Blake High School in Silver Spring. Students couldn’t enroll in AP or honors-level courses without demonstrating they were capable of the work. “And it was difficult for kids who were not in honors courses to demonstrate that they could do it.”
The success of urban schoolteacher Jaime Escalante with a group of minority AP students in East Los Angeles in the 1980s convinced public educators that motivation and hard work might be just as important as standardized test scores in predicting AP success. Over the past few years, that philosophy has become pervasive in the Washington region.
Principals and teachers in Montgomery high schools began looking for reasons to include students in AP courses, rather than reasons to keep them out. The process evolved into a science: All students now take the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT, a strong predictor of AP potential, in the ninth grade. Principals get spreadsheets that allow them to sort students by PSAT score and grade-point average to identify those capable of AP study not enrolled in an AP course.
Nine percent of black students in Montgomery high schools, and 23 percent of all students, took at least one AP exam in spring 2005; final 2006 figures are not available.
How is it defined as “elitism” to use test scores as the indicator for this program?
Read the rest of the article to get the rest of the picture. The excerpt above are what stuck out to me. As always, share your thoughts.
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