Number Two Pencil - When passing the test may not be the point
Jay Mathews used to teach AP high school classes, and spent five years researching the success of Jaime Escalante (the Stand And Deliver teacher) and the disadvantaged minority students at Garfield High School. He's now uncovered a graphic (in Do What Works: How Proven Practices Can Improve America's Public Schools, by Tom Luce and Lee Thompson) which supports his belief that even students who fail AP exams ultimately benefit from the classes:
...to someone like me who has, along with many high school Advanced Placement (AP) teachers, sought statistical proof of the power of their work with disadvantaged students, this [graphic] is like finding that big flat-screen TV I always wanted under the Christmas tree.
...I...have spent the past 22 years of my life trying to explain to readers why those kids were able to learn so much, and why most American high schools are so frustratingly blind to the lessons of Escalante and Garfield. It wasn't magic. Escalante and the many other great AP teachers at that school did not triumph because they were classroom geniuses. Then and now, they successfully prepared low-income students for college level tests by encouraging them to believe they were capable and by making sure they had enough time to prepare.
I learned one more thing at Garfield that is still so contrary to popular opinion that one parent in a wealthy suburban Chicago high school said in a letter to her local newspaper that it "defied common sense." Students who struggle in an AP course with its college-sized reading list and flunk the college-level, three-hour final exam, I learned, are still much better off than if they had been denied a chance to take the course and the test. They have just played 72 holes with the academic equivalent of Tiger Woods, and although Tiger has beaten them, they have gained from the experience a visceral appreciation of what they are going to have to do to survive in college...
Which takes us back to Figure 17 on page 143 of "Do What Works"...The exciting parts of the chart for me are the middle and right columns, under "Took, But Did Not Pass" an AP exam and "Did Not Take" an AP exam. Students who did not take AP in high school showed little success in college. That was not very startling. But look at the college completion percentages of students who took and failed an AP exam.
Theirs was a strange kind of failure. They were beaten by the equivalent of 30 or 40 strokes by this Tiger Woods of exams, but they still substantially increased their chances of college success. Anglos who flunked an AP exam were twice as likely to get their degrees as Anglos who never took one. Hispanics, African American and low-income students were three times as likely to get their degrees if they at least tried AP.
This is not proof, of course, that AP classes always work miracles; since AP students are currently somewhat self-selected, one could argue that the students who take the classes are more talented than the general population (even if not learned enough to pass the exams), and thus it's not surprising that they would do better in college.
However, these types of results - along with success stories like Escalante's - should be a very strong lesson to everyone who believes the only way to help disadvantaged students achieve (and gain high "self-esteem") is to bring the classes down to their level and not challenge them too much. Anyone who believes that such students would receive no benefit at all from a tough AP class - and an exam that's too difficult for them - should have to come up with an alternate explanation for these numbers.
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