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At an online discussion site about college admissions, hosted by the Washington Post, the moderator, columnist Jay Mathews, recently posted the following:
“A very interesting email arrived a few minutes ago from a Washington area parent. I will disguise the details, but it is a pretty common situation all around the country. She has a son who would like to go to a Catholic high school where his friends are going, but she discovered that, like many private and public schools, this school will only let students take AP if they have a GPA of 90 percent or above. He is sort of a mid to high 80s student. In their neighborhood is a public high school with a fine reputation that lets any student take AP who wishes to work hard. I told her the AP part of the question was easy. He would get a better education, all things being equal, at the public school. But all things are NOT equal. His friends are going to be at the Catholic school. I told her that if his friends were conscientious students, that was a positive factor that she might consider. Friends are very important to this age group, and in the end they might lead him to study harder. She was worried that without a lot of APs on his transcript, he would have a tougher time getting into a top college. I said that might be right, but there were plenty of good colleges he would get into with or without AP. What advice would you give her, and why?”
By way of background, AP stands for Advanced Placement. I have taught both AP and regular high school psychology classes and have worked in both public and parochial high schools.
The AP program is a series of 37 college-level courses students take in high school, for which they may receive college credit. The nationally administered AP exam is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being considered a passing score. Well over half of the nation’s high schools offer AP courses.
Mathews is perhaps the best-known educational writer in the country. He began writing about AP many years ago when he catalogued the experiences of Jaime Escalante at Garfield High School in Los Angeles. Escalante’s exploits subsequently became known to the world through the movie “Stand and Deliver.” Mathews most recent book about the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), “Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools In America,” was published earlier this year.
Mathews and I have sparred periodically about educational issues- specifically regarding AP- (click here While we generally agree that AP is a terrific program, http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i22/22a03301.htm
/>we disagree about access and admissions’ issues regarding AP.
We have an even more fundamental disagreement about high school education. Mathews suggests that all (or nearly all) of our high school students should be challenged to take a college-level course at some point during their high school years. This would mean even greater and faster expansion of AP. I would prefer that our efforts be put into strengthening existing high school curriculum and insuring that all our students meet more basic standards.
Mathews has developed a high school rating system that ranks schools numerically according to the number of college-level tests (primarily AP) that high school students take. He does not attempt to calibrate how students do on the tests nor does he use any other criteria to judge schools’ quality. Mathews has been ranking schools in this manner for ten years and those rankings are memorialized each year in Newsweek Magazine’s Best High Schools’ edition.
Many high schools have developed policies to increase the numbers of students taking AP tests, largely as a means to become a highly-ranked Newsweek high school, despite the fact that the accelerated AP growth (about 10 percent per year) has resulted in increasing percentages of students failing (scoring 1’s or 2’s) the exams.
Now, reconsider Mathews’ opening remarks to the mother of the eighth-grade student. Mathews essentially frames high school in limited terms, very much like his narrow definition of high school excellence. He reinforces the mother’s mistaken implication that she should be making her son’s high school attendance decision based upon an either/or formula- attend school with friends or go to a school that will allow open access to AP. That is a false dichotomy, but is regretfully the way many parents have come to regard high school. High school, however, is not and should not be, an audition for college admission.
A better approach to considering where a parent might send his child to high school is to consider a variety of factors, a primary one of which should be the child’s input. There are many questions that parents should be asking and, in the case of the mother who wrote Mathews, she might ask: Is the boy working hard and getting grades in the mid 80's or is he screwing off? Has he demonstrated some passion for learning at some point? How important is religion to the family and is there a spiritual component to the parochial school that will be valuable for the kid? Are finances a concern? Sports programs? Extracurriculars? I can think of loads more things but these questions could be a jumping off place for the discussion that should take place between the mother and her son, rather than between a mother and a newspaper columnist and his readers.
