AP Course Offerings

Drop Sharply

By Scott J. Cech

From Education Week

IN the wake of the first-ever audit of Advanced Placement (AP) courses, educators are giving mixed reviews to what the head of the AP program is calling "the larg-est curricular review that's ever been undertaken in American his-

tory."

One of the more striking effects of the audit was a steep drop in the number of schools offering Ad-vanced Placement courses. After more than 30 years of steady growth, schools worldwide offer-ing at least one AP course dropped by nearly 13 percent from the 2006-07 school year to the current one, according to the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit or-ganization that owns the Advanced Placement brand.

[Schools offering at least one AP course had grown from 104 in 1955-56 to 16,464 in 2006-07, before dropping to 14,383 this year.]

AP teachers at high schools around the world took part in the audit, which the College Board an-nounced in 2005 amid concerns about whether the program's rapid growth had diluted its quality. The process, which is ongoing, involved a review by college professors of individual teachers' syllabuses in

• the 37 subject areas covered in AP classes, which are designed to teach college-level material and prepare students to pass end-of-course AP exams that can qualify them for college credit.

As of early November, the Col-lege Board had authorized AP

Scott J. Cech is a staff writer for Education \Neek. Condensed with permis-sion from Education Week, 27 (November 14, 2007), 1, 13. Copyright 2007 Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. For more information, please visit www. edweek.org.

February 2008

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THE EDUCATION DIGEST

classes at 14,383 secondary schools, 2,081 fewer than the 16,464 schools that offered at least one AP course during the 2006-07 school year.

Board officials said they did not know how many of those 2,081 schools had stopped offering AP courses because all of their sylla-buses had been rejected, and how many had done so without even submitting any syllabuses for re-view.

They declined to specify how many individual classes had been authorized to use the AP name this school year, saying they would re-lease totals on syllabuses approved and rejected sometime after Janu-ary 31.

Officials said more than 140,000 syllabuses had been reviewed as of early November. A searchable da-tabase of all the courses authorized for the current school year was posted on the College Board's Web site November 1.

Trevor Packer, the College Board vice president who oversees the AP program, said the audit was de-signed to assure college-admissions officers and others "that 'AP' wasn't being attached to courses that weren't AP, and that any course labeled 'AP' had been examined by college faculty."

He had heard from admissions officials who were examining col-lege applicants' high school tran-scripts and wanted to know, for example, if there was really such a class as "AP Study Hall."

As of this school year. Packer said, "schools will not be putting the AP label on courses that they don't have permission to do so."

Access to What?

The decrease in the number of schools offering AP classes comes amid efforts by the College Board, President Bush, and others in the policy making and education are-nas to dramatically expand access to AP courses among groups of stu-dents underrepresented in them, including those from low-income families and some racial- and eth-nic-minority groups.

Bush called for 70,000 new math and science Advanced Placement teachers in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and the College Board has committed itself to the goal of making at least 10 AP classes available in every high school na-tionwide by 2010.

"Educators have consistently stated that students in all schools deserve access to college-level courses," College Board spokes-woman Sheila Jamison noted in an e-mail. But she added: "The audit was partially intended to ensure that traditionally underserved stu-dents were not given subpar AP courses."

Daria Hall, the assistant director for K-12 policy at the Education Trust, a Washington-based re-search and advocacy group that seeks to improve the education of low-income and minority students.

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AP Course Offerings Drop Sharply

said she was less concerned about a drop in the number of schools ostensibly offering AP than "whether more kids are getting ac-cess to rigorous coursework."

"Just calling a course 'advanced' doesn't translate into actual ad-vanced content," she said.

Criteria Clarified

College Board officials don't dis-agree. A central goal of the audit, they said, was to ensure that classes were up to date and up to snuff.

Thomas Matts, director of the audit, said it was never intended to weed out courses that came close to meeting the criteria, "but rather to support teachers' and adminis-trators' understandings of the course requirements while requir-ing that teachers provide concrete evidence of those understandings through their syllabuses."

But some educators argued that AP teachers were given too much help, so that it was impossible to say whether their classes were truly college-level.

More than two-thirds of the syl-labuses teachers submitted for re-view were approved immediately. Teachers had two more chances to submit their syllabuses, and thou-sands more of the remaining 33 percent later won approval.

College Board officials estimated that 17,000 teachers did not meet the initial criteria to submit a syllabus.

In addition to detailed, course-specific College Board syllabus

checklists that teachers could con-sult online, reviewers gave them pointers and feedback about how to improve their chances.

"We told them exactly what the curricular requirements were," Matts said. "If they didn't pass mus-ter the second time, we actually called them on the phone and had a conversation so that the teacher [was] clear what they'd need to do. We didn't say, 'If you write this, you'll get authorized,' but we made sure the teacher understood the requirements."

Not Punitive

Matts said the multimillion-dol-lar audit was never meant to pun-ish teachers. Rather than being an accountability measure under which transgressors were penal-ized, he said, the audit "did wind up being a professional-development session for a number of teachers."

. In at least one state. College Board officials went so far as to conduct in-person workshops to help teachers.

Barmak Nassirian, the associate executive director of the Washing-ton-based American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admis-sions Officers, said the audit's meth-odology "leaves a lot of fudge fac-tor, [and seems] highly susceptible to gaming."

"How serious an audit could it be?" said Nassirian, whose organi-zation represents more than 10,000 higher education admissions and

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registration professionals in more than 30 countries. "Does the IRS actually hand out ahead of time [instructions about] what it takes to get through an audit?"

'Doesn't Take Much'

William Lichten, a professor emeritus of physics at Yale Univer-sity who has researched and writ-ten about the Advanced Placement program, said an audit focused on syllabuses could only scratch the surface.

"It doesn't take very much time to write a syllabus," he said. "The actual preparation and how well you implement it is another matter."

Philip M. Sadler, a Harvard Uni-versity researcher, questioned whether the audit might have screened out excellent teachers whose syllabuses might not read the way the College Board would prefer.

"We have these amazing teach-ers all over the country who teach in lots of different ways whose stu-dents pass the AP exam—I think that should be the primary audit," he said. He compared the College Board's method of auditing courses to an audit of doctors that only, took into account what equipment they had.

"What you really want to know is, did their patients get cured or did they die?" Sadler said. "You'd probably want to know if they lived or died, even if [the doctor] didn't have the latest electronic scale."

The College Board has said it

plans to follow up its reviews dur-ing the 2008-09 school year with a few in-person visits by professors to schools with especially low AP-exam scores.

Packer said in an interview, how-ever, that observations of how syl-labuses are being followed up will only be conducted with advance notice.

While Packer conceded that pre-arranged visits would allow schools with subpar teaching to put a good face on potentially lackluster peda-gogy, he said the audits were "not a policing mechanism. . . . [W]e are not a police force."

'It's a Beginning'

Johnston, of Maine's education department, said he sees nothing wrong with "a before-and-after ef-fect where those [ AP teachers] that had difficulties with their syllabuses got them fixed."

"If there have been changes be-cause of that, that's a great effect of the audit," he said.

Moreover, Johnston said, the process was far from a cakewalk for some teachers—even those who have been teaching AP for years.

"We have an [AP] U.S. history teacher with a strong track record— a lot of her students score four or five [out of five possible points on their AP exams], and it's rare she has a student score less than three, but her syllabus took several resubmissions," he said.

While some teachers had to put

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as little as three hours into prepar-ing their syllabuses, he added, some took up to 40 hours on the task.

Brian Rodriguez, the AP coordi-nator at Encinal High School in Alameda, CA, said the process "ac-tually was easier than I thought it was going to be," thanks to the de-tailed syllabus guidelines the Col-lege Board posted on its Web site.

"I think the College Board made it easy to get approval," said Rod-riguez. Although he took eight un-compensated hours to prepare his syllabuses for submission, and ended up having to resubmit one with more reading materials, he said the audit's bark was worse than its advertised bite.

"The word that was put forward at the [College Board] conferences," he said, "was ... if you don't get

. [syllabuses] approved right away, it was off to the Russian front with

you, and your kids will be serving fries at McDonald's."

Others said it was too soon to render a verdict on a process that is essentially still in progress. Al-though the deadline for most teach-ers passed in June, College Board officials extended the syllabus-sub-mission deadline to January 31 for teachers with extenuating circum-stances.

"We really don't have any.infor-mation to evaluate whether it [the audit] worked," Yale's Lichten said, pointing to the lack of information on how many syllabuses for the current school year were rejected as insufficiently rigorous.

Still, he added, "I've looked at [the audit] as a positive—it's a be-ginning, at least, to begin to restore quality to the program. Maybe a very small positive, but a positive nonetheless." fiD

AP PROGRAM GROWTH	16,464
A half-century of nearly uninterrupted expansion
in the number of schools worldwide offering	2006-07
Advanced Placement courses has been
reversed this school year, after the
first-ever audit of the	14,383
courses' content.	2007-08

1960	1970	1980	1990	2000
1955				2008
		February 2008		57