| I was going to provide some data to debunk the College Board’s claim that “our schools are performing at a level far below almost every other major industrialized nation. And the statistics continue to get worse every year” with some historical data, but Brian beat me to it with a list of great sources.Here I add some information from the College Board (http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/public/pdf/ap/rtn/AP-Report-to-the-Nation.pdf ) that seems to contradict its own claim:7.3 point increase since 2001 in the percentage of U.S. public high school graduates earning AP scores of 3 or higher…More graduates are succeeding on AP Exams today than took AP Exams in 2001Since the College Board has been pushing the AP courses as a rigorous academic experience and the AP exam an academically demanding test of students preparedness for college, this shows the U.S. education is not getting worse every year, right?
The AP story may reveal the motivation behind the Ad and the Don’tForgetEd.org campaign—more customers for College Board products paid by tax dollars.
According to the College Board 2011 AP report, the number of students who took the AP exam more than doubled in a decade: 431,573 in 2001 to 903,630 in 2011. And an Associate Press storyhttp://www.deseretnews.com/article/765574199/AP-for-everyone-AP-classes-growing-in-popularity-as-schools-look-to-raise-standards.html?pg=allin May 2012 says “2 million students will take 3.7 million end-of-year AP exams.” The fee for each AP Exam in 2012 is $87 and that is $321.9 million total.
For low-income students, the Feds provide $53 per exam, meaning we, the taxpayers are paying for students to take the AP exam. 612,282 out of the 903,630 in 2011 were taken by low-income graduates paid by the taxpayers. Not a problem for me, if it truly helps the students. But it is not. It is just one more way to demoralize the struggling poor students. From the Associated Press story:
Nationally, 56 percent of AP exams taken by the high school class of 2011 earned a 3 or higher, but there are wide disparities. The mean score is 3.01 for white students and 1.94 for blacks. In New Hampshire, almost three-quarters of exams earn a 3 or higher; in Mississippi, it’s under a third. In the District of Columbia, more than half of exams score a 1.
More importantly, plenty of evidence showing that the AP does not really benefit. “AP courses provide little or no additional post-secondary benefit,” writes economist Kristin Klopfenstein and her colleagues http://www.aeaweb.org/assa/2005/0108_1015_0302.pdf and “Even a score of 5 on an A.P. test is no guarantee of a college grade of A in the same subject,” said Harvard’s Philip M. Sadler, who directs the science education department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics.http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/the-advanced-placement-juggernaut/
So might we hypothesize the following chain of reasoning behind the College Board campaign? (I know it sounds quite cynical):
American education is crumbling
Government should invest in improving education
Improving education means increasing college going and completion rates
To increase college readiness and success, you need “rigorous curriculum” and standards
And who provides that?
Readers who want to see the historical performance of US students can read my blog post at: http://zhaolearning.com/2011/01/30/%E2%80%9Cit-makes-no-sense%E2%80%9D-puzzling-over-obama%E2%80%99s-state-of-the-union-speech/ |
And here is Brian’s comment in response to Peter Kaufmann of the College Board:
Brian
Mr. Kauffmann, I can’t believe you rely on disproven talking points to make your points. I expect better from an employee of The College Board.
Here are some references for you to check out so you can update your talking points with actual, provable facts. It’s an academic tradition, you know:
1. “. . .American universities graduate three times as many qualified science and engineering students each year as can be absorbed in these fields. (Source: Science and Engineering Indicators, 2008)”
2. From GoodEducation:
“Back in 1964, American 13-year-olds took the First International Math Study and ended up ranking in 11th place. Considering that only 12 nations participated, including Australia, Finland, and Japan, our next-to-last performance was pretty abysmal. Other international tests American students have taken over the years have also never showed that we were in the top spot. It’s a myth that we’ve fallen from our glory days.”
3.The 2010 Brown Center Report on Education:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2011/02/07-education-loveless
4. From the OECD Report from which your talking point comes from:
“The number of Americans earning college degrees has been steadily rising, from 11% of the population in 1970 to 30% in 2010. Younger Americans, however, are not keeping pace with their peers in other developed countries, so among 34 countries in the OECD report, we have fallen to 15th place in the percentage of 25 to 34 year olds with college degrees.”
You seem to have left out the part about it being the 23-34 year-old cohort that is slipping behind. Analysis of the report also states that one of the probably causes of the lag is that the price of a college education in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world and is subsidized to a far lesser degree probably due to the low to median tax rate in the US compared to the rest of the world.
Also, you neglect to mention the good news from the same report:
From SV[e]F:
“The 500-page OECD report is a treasure trove (overused term, but true in this case) of amazing statistics and many of them place the U.S. in good standing.
– 99% of our K-12 teachers meet state qualifications.
– Even though classroom instruction time has taken a hit, we still exceed the OECD average at 1,068 hours for high school.
– Ditto for class size; it’s increasing but remains lower that most other nations.
– Despite the high price tag for a college degree, graduates more than make up for it in future earnings and lower unemployment rates.
– The unemployment rate for high school drop outs is 15.8%, but for college graduates it drops to 4.9%.
– College graduates earn about 87% more over their lifetime than high school graduates who don’t go on to college.
The facts seem to negate the panic your advertisement and your quote of talking points invites.
The problem, as it always has been, is poverty, lack of governmental support through tax dollars, austerity budgets, and lack of political will . I wonder if The College Board plans on addressing these issues through your PR campaign? |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In my experience, AP/College Board seems much less interested in providing an intellectually nourishing experience, and much more interested in collecting $$ from test sign-ups, hence their encouragement to enroll more and more kids who may not be up to snuff. I dislike teaching AP classes because of the teaching to the test; there is a big difference between teaching kids about the Aeneid vs. trying to train them to take a test on it.
I am much more in favor of concurrent enrollment classes aligned with local colleges, which do what AP was supposed to do, but puts emphasis back on the course rather than on a test at the end.
Yes, that is what I have read. It appears the College Board is doing quite well financially.
How do they qualify as a non-profit? Where does all the money go? Salaries?
“It’s kind of an easy reform — plunk in an AP course,” said University of Northern Colorado scholar Kristin Klopfenstein, who edited a recent collection of studies on the AP program. But without accompanying steps, it’s not clear AP does much good, especially for students scoring 1s and 2s. “What I’ve observed in a lot of cases is AP programs being helicopter-dropped in with the hope that the high standards themselves would generate results.”
Perhaps surprisingly, those concerns are shared by the not-for-profit College Board, which runs the AP program and has benefited from its growth (collecting $353 million in revenue from its college readiness programs, including AP exam fees, in 2009).
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/05/report_more_students_taking_ad.html
Not so much “crumbling” as being hammered with jack(ass)hammers.
AP exams are a cash cow for the College Board, no doubt about it. So why do schools get in bed with College Board and create such ugly babies? Because certain magazines base most of their rankings on how many AP tests are taken, not on how well students do on those tests. Schools like high rankings, and real estate companies like schools with high rankings, so kids are pushed into AP classes when they would best be served elsewhere.
A score of 3 is considered “passing” by the College Board, but fewer and fewer colleges are accepting a score of 3. That’s not surprising. Colleges don’t like to give away credits. Schools routinely publicize their AP “passing” rates, but that doesn’t mean that all those kids get college credit. Not even close.
Many, many students in those AP classes would be better served in a rich, stimulating, challenging, non-AP class.
For an excellent book on this topic, please take a look at The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins.
Jay Matthews in the Washington Post makes a case that just by being in the AP level classes, to being in that high expectations course, students will be more successful in college. I have watched students play the system- they use it to get into college but have no interest in actually studying for the exams. They take the exams otherwise they won’t get their ten points added on as having taken the rigorous exams, exams a great deal of the time that are subsidized by outside agencies. They do the same for IB exams as well but there is no ballyhoo for that type of exam coming in- it competes with the College Board juggernaut. Now if colleges made the students submit their scores as a condition of acceptance into college, that might change the seriousness with which students enrolled, studied for and approached their exams and course work.
That high schools are using them as a hype machine for making themselves look good is disgusting. It used to be that bored students were given the option of challenging themselves but now students, for various reasons, are almost compelled to take these as a way to boost their college chances without having any real reason to actually follow through on the exams once they are in.
Too many students are in those classes that have no real business being in them.
Another part of the equation: School ranking lists that use the # of students who take AP or IB tests as one of the factors to determine the quality of the school. The HS in my district uses this list to claim it is in the top 1000 of all high schools in the U.S. To get a chance to be on the list, a school needs to submit information. Not all schools do unless they want PR.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/newsweek/2012/05/20/america-s-best-high-schools.html
“The problem, as it always has been, is poverty, lack of governmental support through tax dollars, austerity budgets, and lack of political will” hits the nail on the head – we do not put our money where our mouth is when it comes to children in america.
I disagree- we spend a fortune on the “children” in America. It is not monitored and much is wasted.
As an AP English teacher in the classroom let me assure you that the curriculum is stringent and demanding and the students deserve their college credit if they pass the exam. I will stack my class requirements against any freshman comp course and guarantee it would be more successful in preparing students to write coherently and persuasively. We have dual credit courses in our high school and the AP program far exceeds what is required for those classes. AP encourages open enrollment and students may not always be totally prepared accordingly, but even those who are not truly ready for the rigors of the course benefit from the challenge. If someone is making money off of the program, so what? Colleges too are in the “business” of education as well.
The article states they are listed as a non-profit, which means all the money must go into their salaries, very lucrative salaries. Many students in AP should not be there.
Good for you, Joan.
Another indication that the College Board is interested first and foremost in money is the way they determine AP Scholar awards; students are given these awards based more on the number of exams taken (and paid for) than scores on the exams.
I just graduated from high school this June. I have taken 16 AP classes, all of which were paid for by my school. I passed every single one. Having just finished college orientation, I realize now how beneficial this was. I can graduate college in two years wih a bachelor’s degree, taking the same amount of classes as everyone else, and still having time for other programs, because I can use my AP credit for so many classes. The assertion made here that AP has no benefits for underprivileged students is ridiculous. If they apply themselves and pass the exams, they can make college so much more affordable by being able to skip general education requirements. With the cost of tuition these days, even being able to skip a few classes can be huge.
Collegeboard does not serve the youth. $31.00 for rush score as pre-requisite to enroll in college summer class. Scores became available at the college board on July 1, college class started July 9th; in spite of special rush and $31.00, no scores, no class. Lousy service, detrimental to youth who need their service.