Every state ought to follow South Carolina's lead in making AP courses more widely available.
A few years ago, when I first started writing about the importance of common educational standards, most Americans considered national or state standards to be out of the question. Now, we have broad agreement in the U.S. that standards are essential. Indeed, most of the 50 states are already on the way to developing them.
The next question is, what to do while we're waiting? Even when states have agreed on the level of writing students should reach and what they should know about American history, for example, it will still be necessary to devise curricula, train teachers to use them, and create assessments. And if these things are done right, the process is bound to be a lengthy one. What happens to our current students and to those who come along in the meantime? Are there any standards that can be put in place while the states build their systems of standards and assessments? One option is to make more extensive use of the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) program, which is our best home-grown example of high standards in action.
AP was started 40 years ago, and it is based on the idea that students will work hard to meet high standards if they are given the right kind of incentive. In this case, the incentive is college credit for advanced work taken in high school. There are now 29 AP courses in 16 subjects, including mathematics, history, music, chemistry, and computer science. Students who take and AP course show they have achieved at a college level by getting a 3 or better (out of a possible 5) on an exam that is set by AP and graded by an outside group of high school and college teachers. Not every college accepts AP, but the list that does includes Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and nearly 3,000 others. AP credit demonstrates that a student is serious about learning and willing to work hard. And given rising college fees, there is also a financial incentive attached to AP credit.
Advanced Placement exams are not as tough as those faced by French and German students seeking entry to college, but they are not pushovers, either. Most are three hours long and include essay or problem-solving questions, as well as multiple-choice. And even the multiple-choice questions, require real content knowledge. Take the following American History question: In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover disagreed most strongly about the desirability of (A) a balanced federal budget; (BJ farm price supporters; (C) federal aid to corporations; (D) a program of public works; (E) federal relief to individuals. A student would need more than the vague general knowledge that we associate with many multiple-choice tests to pick out the correct answer to this question.
The trouble with the current AP program is that it does not touch many students. In 1995, only 8 percent of U.S. eighteen-year-olds took AP exams, and only 5 percent scored a 3 or above. One reason for this is financial. It costs schools money for the training AP teachers must have, and students must pay to take the exams. However, some states -- South Carolina, Indiana, and Utah, for example -- are now using a combination of mandates and incentives to get more schools to offer AP courses and more students to take them.
In 1984, South Carolina, with the leadership of Governor Richard Riley, who is now U.S. Secretary of Education, passed legislation requiring all schools to offer AP classes or make them available through independent study or distance learning. The state also encouraged greater use of AP courses and exams by allocating money for teacher training and exam fees for needy students. Finally, South Carolina strengthened the most important incentive of all by getting state colleges and universities to accept AP courses for college credit. The result has been a big increase both in the schools offering AP classes and the students taking them. In 1983, only 3 percent of students took an AP exam, but by 1995, the figure had risen to 11 percent, and the number of schools offering AP courses increased from 3 7 percent in 1983 to 70 percent in 1995.
Every state ought to follow South Carolina's lead in making AP courses more widely available and in removing financial roadblocks to offering and taking them. If states do that, they might also discover that AP offers some useful perspectives on their own standards-setting process. Once greater participation in AP becomes a goal, states will find that more of their students can meet tough AP standards than they thought possible. They will also find that greater participation in AP shifts the whole agenda of their schools towards higher academic achievement. And they might be led to rethink the link between exams and college entrance.
If nearly one-third of youngsters in Germany and France and Japan take and pass four or five exams that are at least as difficult as the AP's, why shouldn't our students be able to do the same? They'll need to if we expect to measure up.