Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools

4. The Right Curriculum: Expanding Advanced Placement

105 4 thE right cUrricUlUM Expanding Advanced Placement The 1980s ushered in a new era of concern over the quality of the school curriculum. At a time when economic competitiveness demanded greater educational achievement, standardized test scores revealed that American students were continuing to fall behind their international counterparts.1 And, in the post–civil rights era when promoting equality was an increasingly prominent goal in education, national test scores revealed dramatically lower scores for black and Latino students than for whites.2 But while many American schools struggled to help their students reach levels of proficiency, some were among the best in the world. Such schools not only promoted high achievement but also sent their graduates off to first-rate colleges. And though curricula varied across top schools, they did have something in common: the Advanced Placement Program (AP)—a series of courses and exams across a variety of subject areas designed to promote rigor and achievement among top high school students. AP was conceived of shortly after the Second World War as a way of engaging and challenging the academically able and awarding them advanced standing in college. School administrators and reformers concerned with these high-achieving students and, for that matter, with national security after the launching of Sputnik, argued for increased academic rigor and tracking students by ability. Consequently, with assistance from the College Board, which administered AP, the best American high schools quickly adopted it as a way of promoting giftedness. Within two decades, the program became a signal of a top school. The design of the program was simple. High schools with the means to do so would offer ostensibly college-level versions of school subjects, tracking their best students into AP classes. At the end of the academic year, 106 ExcEllEncE for All participating students would sit for a standardized exam, which would then be graded between “1,” indicating below-average understanding, and “5,” indicating exemplary comprehension. Those grades would then determine whether students received college credit, which participating colleges and universities initially agreed to grant for scores of “3”—in theory the equivalent of a “C” in a college-level course—or higher. AP provided tangible benefits for students. It allowed them to earn college credit and, as a curricular status symbol, it gave them an edge in an increasingly competitive college admissions process. Consequently, it was not long until advocates for underserved students labeled the program elitist , and they were right. In 1954 only 532 students took AP tests. By 1988, though, that number was up to 292,164. But while the program did expand dramatically over that period of time, it still remained a rarity in urban public education, growing mostly in suburban and private schools. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a hybrid of the Cold War–era social efficiency arguments and civil rights–era social justice arguments began to emerge. Supporters of AP began to argue that bringing the program into urban public schools would promote both equity and excellence, aiding underserved students while increasing national achievement and attainment rates. Further, it would expand access without interfering with the work of suburban and private schools. Consequently, AP exploded. One million students participated in the program in 2002; by 2008, that figure had grown to 1.6 million. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, able and ambitious students across the nation had acquired access to Advanced Placement courses and exams. This had the effect of strengthening the curricular offerings of many schools, but, more importantly, it gave a leg up in the college admissions race to throngs of young people adorning their high school transcripts with AP courses each year. “Like cellphones, lattes and other once-elite products ,” noted one commentator, Advanced Placement courses “have become ubiquitous.”3 The expansion of AP seemed a triumph for advocates of excellence for all. Yet the expansion of the program was not without consequence. As AP lost its uniqueness and moved to a wider range of schools, it less effectively identified the most talented and ambitious students. As a result, colleges began to give the program less recognition in the admissions process . Educators at top high schools had long expressed reservations about the program for its focus on breadth over depth and on preparation for an end-of-year test. But they stuck with it as long as colleges awarded prefer- thE right cUrricUlUM 107...