Andrea Gabor wrote this article for Bloomberg News.
Andrea Gabor, a former editor at Business Week and U.S. News & World Report, is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the author of “After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.”
The College Board, which administers college entrance exams to high school students, is trying to use its advanced placement courses and tests for high-achieving students to get American schools to take civics seriously again.
That’s a welcome development after years of neglect by both schools and policymakers. Even better, last year’s redesign of its AP U.S. government and politics course — the first since it was introduced in 1986 — goes well beyond requiring basic knowledge of, say, how a bill becomes law, and seeks to get students engaged with civic life. While the academic part of the AP U.S. government course explores the diverse forces that shape everything from legislation to Supreme Court precedents, students also are required to put their knowledge into action by working on a civics project, even one that takes sides in today’s partisan political battles.
The new U.S. government AP is part of a nationwide push — both inside and outside schools — for high-school students to engage in civic debate and action. Last year, Massachusetts became the first state to require schools to coordinate student-led civics projects, though that state’s high school projects must be nonpartisan.
A civics revival is long overdue. As of 2018, only eight states required students to take a yearlong civics and government class, and only 19 required students to take a civics exam to graduate. Even the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered the nation’s report card, dropped its 4th- and 12th-grade civics and American history exam, in 2014. The ostensible reason was to save money, but the NAEP then adopted a new technology and engineering literacy test a year later.
Indeed, civics fell victim to the narrowing of curricula under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and to the standardized testing regimen that focused on math, science and English. Worried about economic competition from China, neither Democrats nor Republicans anticipated the recent populist and authoritarian threat to Western democracies that civics education is meant to forestall.
The reality is, schools need to do both: prepare students for a global economy and to be engaged citizens in a democracy.
Putting action at the core of civics education may seem counterintuitive at a time when basic knowledge of the three branches of the U.S. government is in short supply and especially considering that college students’ activism has often been seen as controversial — think of the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South during the civil rights era and the protests against the Vietnam War.
Yet the benefit of getting high-school students working on civics projects of their own choosing — even partisan ones — goes beyond tapping into the innate desire of teenagers to change the world. Having students work on new legislation or lobby their city council representatives can promote a deep understanding of local, state and federal government and provide the basis for future political engagement.
That’s especially true for immigrants and members of minority groups. Studies conducted nearly 50 years apart — including one by the American Enterprise Institute — show that civics education is especially effective both in teaching poor students and immigrants about government and in increasing their sense of political empowerment.
Students already are demonstrating the power of action civics. In Chicago, high schoolers lobbied Illinois legislators to change harsh disciplinary practices that often pushed minority students out of school and into the criminal justice system, and were instrumental in helping to draft a new school-discipline law in 2016. In New York City, minority student activists are suing the education department for equal access to athletic facilities and school teams. And schools across the country are experimenting with efforts to let students determine school spending priorities on extras such as building a greenhouse or funding a music club.
The Stoneman Douglas High School students in Parkland, Florida, may provide the best argument for a civics approach that encompasses both knowledge and action. Their gun-control advocacy since the 2018 shootings there, which killed 17 students and school staffers, was inspired by research they were already doing for both their AP government class and a district-wide debate program.
Educators also are developing ways to measure the educational value of such projects. In New Hampshire, New York City and Oakland, they have developed assessments that treat the projects like mini dissertations and often require a written report as well as an oral presentation. The AP’s civics projects, however, will count only toward a course grade and not its college-level U.S. government test; that’s in large part because most college government courses do not require projects, according to the College Board.
The biggest challenge may be to scale the efforts at action civics. Only about 281,000 public-school students take the AP U.S. government course — last year, about 30 percent of these students were African-American or Latino and 23 percent were low-income; indeed, the College Board has come under criticism recently for failing to make its tests more accessible to minority students.
States and districts also will need to resist pressures from both the political left and the right that could dilute the push for more robust civics. The movement to require ethnic studies must not be allowed to erode time and attention devoted to civics. And states that require high-school graduates to pass the U.S. citizenship test must resist the lure of a rote multiple-choice approach to civics.
Instead, embracing a meaningful civics project as part of a broader U.S. government and history curriculum may be the best way to help kids make the connection between what they learn about the nation’s political institutions and a future they can affect.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Andrea Gabor at Andrea.Gabor@baruch.cuny.edu
The College Board needs to get out of education….period! It is a bloated industry that has NOTHING to do with learning. What kids need is social studies K-12 and not some test prep, AP garbage with an art project.
I grew up attending a midwestern public K-12 in the 1970s. I took “social studies” every year, along with “History” (US history every single year K-12) and “Government”.
I came to college having little knowledge of the big questions but I had memorized a lot of dates and battles and generals and Presidents that I promptly forgot and can quickly look up during the rare occasions I needed them.
Meanwhile, my kid did AP courses and learned infinitely more about the larger questions that arise in our democracy and spent a lot of time in class discussing them and writing about them. I wish I had the chance to take those in high school.
I realize some teachers clearly are teaching AP classes and doing a terrible job of it. But other teachers are teaching them and engaging the students to think about ideas in a way that is much better than the teachers who teach regular social studies classes.
In decades before AP, teachers used textbooks from textbook publishers that included whatever the textbook publisher thought would sell. Sometimes those textbooks were written so that they could get a lot of sales in very conservative states. Some textbook publishers didn’t care.
But it truly mystifies me that people bash AP any more than they should be bashing what came before AP. Was there some perfect time in social studies K-12 education that I am unaware of? Because I did not get to experience it myself so it either came before or after my own years of education.
I do see the problems with AP testing, but I don’t find that the curriculum is particularly bad — in fact, it seems better than much of what came before. I realize some lucky students in expensive private schools or affluent public schools probably had an amazing teacher who simply taught an original curriculum that engaged everyone. But I really doubt social studies education was any better in the past than now. In fact, I think it was worse.
Sorry, NYC parent, nut guess what? There are plenty of teachers who are “engaging the students to think” without the constraints of the AP curriculum and the AP test.
The research on AP courses and tests just does not support your lofty assertions.
democracy,
“The research on AP courses and tests just does not support your lofty assertions.”
I did not make any “lofty assertions” so if that is what you got out of my post, I apologize for terrible writing.
I agree with you that “There are plenty of teachers who are “engaging the students to think” without the constraints of the AP curriculum and the AP test.” I know that is true and I don’t know why my post convinces you otherwise.
I was merely recounting my own experience and those of my kid. Because what is ALSO true is that there are plenty of teachers who are not engaging students to think using whatever non-AP curriculum they are free to use.
I was pointing out that blaming the AP curriculum for why teachers aren’t engaging students to think seems nonsensical. It is just a curriculum and so is using a dull and boring textbook. Neither of them is the magic bullet that results in good, engaging teaching. That depends on the teacher.
Finally, I have picked up those AP Exam review books they sell at book stores. And just skimming through it, I can tell you that the actual material taught is significantly more interesting than any social studies textbook my non-AP High School used. Maybe there is a better than AP curriculum out there, but I don’t understand which curriculum you are talking about. No school has to use AP. But if the choice is AP versus a boring textbook from a publisher, AP seems no worse and sometimes even better.
Public schools often promote civic engagement that has nothing to do with the College Board or AP exams. From canned food drives for needy families, pajama drives for foster children, feeding the homeless, car washes to buy equipment for the fire department, public schools are often civic minded. High school should be a time of civic engagement to prepare all students to be responsible voters and citizens, not simply those in AP classes.
I agree.
Students were learning civics and doing civically minded projects long before AP government for civics classes even existed.
I also wonder about Gabor’ s plug for AP, particularly the way she has made it. See my comment below. Is she getting paid something by College Board to plug AP?
Andrea Gabor is not paid by the College Board. She is a professor at Baruch College and author of “After the Education Wars.” She wrote a terrific book about Deming that among other things explained why merit pay never works.
There are certainly valid reasons to disagree with Andrea Gabor’s praise of AP Government or anything else she wrote in her article and I am intrigued reading some of the people who replied here about why they believe she is wrong.
But I do not understand what purpose it serves to insinuate that Andrea Gabor’s opinion is wrong because she only holds it because she is paid by the College Board. Standard character attack.
If someone has an opinion that is wrong, it is worthwhile to make a good case for why it is wrong. Or maybe we can take a page out of the right wing playbook and find some conference that was co-sponsored by the College Board that Gabor attended and perhaps received an honorarium. Or some similar tenuous connection. And then insinuate that this corrupt woman is pushing a position solely for the money.
I realize I only speak for myself, but I don’t get convinced by character attacks that someone’s argument is wrong. Isn’t that what Trump specializes in? I am convinced because someone bothered to take the time to present their arguments based on fact.
Diane,
THANK YOU so much for this important post.
Civics is so IMPORTANT.
I loved Civics when I was in school and I got a good dose of it during elementary (K-8), high school, and college.
Our young NEED CIVICS. WHY? Democracy is supposed to be a participatory govt. where the rich don’t RULE the rest of us.
I’m leery of the push for civics projects. We habitually underestimate the need for knowledge. We also underestimate the time it takes to instill knowledge. Given this, we need to use the most efficient method of transmitting knowledge. All research shows this is direct instruction. Minimally-guided approaches like project-based learning are relatively inefficient. Five weeks devoted to petitioning city council for a new handicapped access ramp will be instructive; but what if it means axing a unit on how democracies have died? We must seriously consider whether the costs of this shift outweigh the benefits.
Students remember best what they do related to learning. Petitioning reinforces the concept that citizens have power and obligation to act in a democracy.
The Koch network prefers students rely on oligarchs driving government and writing lesson plans.
It’s not as simple as that.
Yes, they will remember the petitioning. But they also would remember a well-taught unit of case studies of petitioners, their causes and their impact. The latter might impart more generative knowledge that the former. Your comment betrays a common prejudice against direct instruction. In fact, research shows direct instruction leads to more and better learning than the fancier, trendier pedagogies as this AFT article shows: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/GuidedInstruction.pdf.
In this case I’ll have to go with personal experience. My civics class had a mock political convention off site, big deal, media came and filmed- it created a life long interest. Possibly, the preferred learning technique is subject or student specific.
I remember from Latin, “All Gaul is divided into three parts”. I learned valuable word derivatives but, it doesn’t compare in interest level.
“All research shows this is direct instruction. Minimally-guided approaches like project-based learning are relatively inefficient.”
Citation needed.
Citation:
Click to access kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf
I agree with you, ponderosa. Thanks for speaking up.
this thinking is very much appreciated: we had such an overwhelming push for “group work” and “projects” once NCLB/RttT invasions hit our school while actual direct and explicit instruction went missing
Millennials understand civics and economic systems better than those Republicans who listen to Fox and ditto the disparagement of socialism while picking up Social Security paychecks and Medicare.
Parkland students’] gun-control advocacy since the 2018 shootings there, which killed 17 students and school staffers, was inspired by research they were already doing for …their AP government class”
That sounds a lot like the plug David Coleman made for AP.
Not sure why Gabor is plugging AP but the way she is doing it is pretty disgusting.
I am delighted that there is movement towards getting civics and constitutional literacy back into public schools. Schools can and should prepare students to participate in our republican form of government. Far too many kids cannot name the three main branches of the federal government.
Some states (including Texas) require all high school students to pass the citizenship exam administered by the BCI to citizen applicants. I think this is terrific.
The actor, Richard Dreyfuss, has set aside several millions of his own money, to push for a return of civics instruction in public schools. Bravo!
see
http://www.thedreyfussinitiative.org
It’s time to bring thinking back to education rather than regurgitating a bunch of irrelevant facts for an irrelevant test. We must not only teach civics, we must teach students to think beyond the confirmation bias.
Students must learn to recognize fact from fiction and understand that the truth may not be what they want to believe but what is real.
Captain Lee 1968: your dream has come true: students now know very few facts (but maybe that’s because their bad teachers forced them to vomit them back up).
Cap Lee is his name. Cap is not short for Captain.
And why would you assume the “68” is short for 1968? The “77” in my screen name has nothing to do with 1977.
Trump went to a private school which in his case didn’t alter his view that what he wants to be true is true. His kids attended private schools and are the same. It seems plausible that public education would have disabused him of his misunderstanding.
Andrea’s views on civics might be enlarged by looking at opportunities for learning well before high school. I would welcome her attention to the fuzz and focus in social studies programs, how these are conceptualized and structured to “cover” (literally and metaphorically) conventional content. Here is an all too common example. https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Learning-in-Ohio/Social-Studies/Ohio-s-Learning-Standards-for-Social-Studies/SSFinalStandards01019.pdf.aspx?lang=en-US
I also think that “going to school” provides opportunities for learning some rudiments of governance and self-governance–what makes a rule fair, who should decide, why, so on. I fear that too many of those opportunities for learning have been replaced by computer programs, many with cute avatars that offer ratings of student compliance instead of discussions and questions. I would also like to see Andrea’s interest extend to civics lessons embedded in non-nonsense discipline (e.g., Doug Lemov’s doctrines on how to teach).
This afternoon I spent some time looking at Charles Koch’s new “Yes.Every Kid” initiative, intent on monitoring statehouses and pushing legislation for school choice, with donors contributing a minimum of $100,000 annually to help lobby for choice. That agenda is “softened” by a parallel “Yes.Every Kid” initiative “that aims to rethink education from the ground up by connecting innovators in a shared mission to conquer ‘one size fits all’ education reform.” The “innovators” opine about education through videos , always about deregulating schools. Some of the “Yes.Every Kid” ideas are conjured from “Big Think,” a content aggregator and marketer of videos, podcasts, and newsletters with a premium option for hot new ideas, for people on the go.
This is to say that learning about lobbying and the role of money and media in “civics” is certainly necessary.
Well, I was writing a somewhat long response to this post since I teach government -all day long.
But I just accidentally deleted it, ha, ha.
So, yeah. It wasn’t meant to be.
We all seem to be sharing the same back-to-school cold where I work. Maybe that’s part of why I’m a little bit out of it.
But, more civics education…I’m all for it.
I taught AP Government. I currently have two dual credit college government classes, plus some other courses. I think the dual credit class does a better job getting the students ready for college….and life.
With all due respect for a guy I usually read carefully and respectfully, I must ask why we offer dual credit to our smartest children. Given that we are usually teaching our most capable students in those classes, why do we want to teach our best students half as much?
Roy…I’m sitting here during my “prep period”. I think you are saying that by skipping, say, an American Government class in college (taking it in high school) that’s cheating the student of that actual college class. By doubling up, a course is actually lost. Hmmm…. yeah..I didn’t think of it that way. Interesting.
My son took a good number of dual credit college classes when he was in high school. It enabled to skip forward while in college and dive into the courses he really wanted (and needed) to take.
Ideally, I’d have a full year of civics in high school. But here in New York State Participation in Government is only a semester course. (Things seem to be getting farther and farther from the ideal the older I get.) The situation is definitely better here in New York compared to some other states, though.
I don’t know. Maybe one reason (one of many) why both dual enrollment and AP classes have become more popular is because of the very real damage that’s been done to the so called “regular” classes in high school. You know, that wrongheaded thinking that if it isn’t tested, it isn’t as important.
There’s been a WHOLE lot of damage done to public education -as very ably documented on this blog. People try to flee that damage in every which way they can. And, isn’t that the objective of some of these so-called “reformers”….to wear down our public schools….to inflict a “death of a thousand cuts”.
It’s sad….it’s tragic…it’s bad enough to push me closer and closer to retirement.
But having said that, Roy, not to be graphic, I have to go pee. Ha, ha. The bell is going to ring soon and I’ll be in here for a long time without a break.
Such is the life of a classroom teacher….
Take care.
Civics education is of primary importance in secondary education. College Board ruins everything it touches, though. Since students who pass AP calculus struggle with calculus at the university level, I hope students who pass AP U.S. government don’t assume they can skip government classes in their post-secondary schoolwork. It’s great to see the beginnings of a movement away from the attitude behind Common Core curriculum narrowing, but College Board is far from the right body to enact it. It would be like charter schools offering civics: good for them, sort of.
We need to move away from privatization and standardized tests before — not after — re-broadening the scope of public education to include valuable civics classes.
It’s not just the students who take AP calc and struggle at the university level. It’s most AP courses…period!
Physics AP: those students struggle with their engineering classes
AP English: students can’t write well, they don’t read well
AP Psych: I can’t even tell you how distorted that one is!!
AP Environmental Science: talk about weird…
I will stand by my statement that AP is crap and I’m glad that someone else sees that everything the College Board touches gets ruined in the process. AP is test prep at it’s finest and nothing more.
LisaM,
One good feature of the AP program is that students can take the tests without taking traditional AP classes. This allows students to certify the knowledge gained even with unconventional perpetration.
LisaM,
I’m not arguing that AP is perfect, but you keep acting like there are some magic high school calculus classes that turn students into top performing college mathematicians.
Do you have any evidence that AP Calculus is worse than the Calculus classes that public high schools used to teach? Or the non-AP Calculus classes that private schools offer that their own school certifies is superior so there is no need to actually prove it via any exam? There are always kids who can get through Calculus and manage to pass. Many students take calculus in high school because it looks good for college and don’t take a lot of advanced math in college. If they do, it is because they are studying engineering or mathematics or possibly economics.
Most students who take a lot of APs think of them as honors classes, not as replacement for college credits. And many very selective private colleges don’t recognize those credits, anyway, or sometimes only if the exam score is a 5, and then only for placement.
However, and this is a big however, I know many low-income students who are able to get a college degree in 3 years because of AP credits. Now maybe they could take some community college credits and do the same, but it tends to be a much more logistical problem and if you don’t have a parent who understands the system and has the time to advise you, many 17 and 18 year olds can struggle figuring it out and the university where they are enrolling may not accept them.
I’m not idealizing AP classes as perfect — they are flawed in some ways. But as a parent who has watched a kid taking them and enjoying what they are learning in a way that I never did in my dull as dirt high school “History” and “Government” classes. I don’t really care if we get rid of all AP classes, but I wish you would explain what would replace them that is supposed to be so much better. And how this great “better than AP” curriculum gets into every school.
I think whether an AP class is interesting or a waste of time has more to do with the teacher teaching it than the curriculum. And I think that is true of every class, whether it is “AP” or just a regular class. Some teachers will make the subject interesting and some will make it boring.
LeftCoastTeacher,
“students who pass AP Calculus struggle with calculus at the university level..”
But students who pass regular high school calculus also struggle with calculus at the university level!
I think if you compared the students who got 5s on AP Calculus BC with the students who got an A in their private school “better than AP Calculus” class instead, there would be little difference. In fact, I suspect the students who got the 5s in the AP Calc BC exam do better. (I say that because I know students that do and they are very good mathematicians and have not struggled in college math classes, where many other students do.)
No disrespect meant to Andrea Gabor, but her piece salivating over Advanced Placement courses — in this case, the AP government course — is characteristic of why public education is in trouble. It’s because people like Gabor – or for that matter, Barack Obama, who pushed AP courses and tests as part of Race to the Top – actually think the SAT and ACT are “important” and measure “smartness,” and they think AP is “better” because it’s, you know, ADVANCED placement.
Here’s what I wrote just the other day in a piece Diane posted about Larry Cuban:
I don’t necessarily DISagree with Larry Cuban that public schools HAVE been ineffectual in reshaping the structure of American society, but that doesn’t mean that they CANNOT be effective in reshaping or even partly reshaping society.
The “problem” isn’t the schools, it’s the “leadership.” Think about it. How many public school principals became administrators because (a) they couldn’t cut it as a teacher, or (b) they wanted more money, or (c) they wanted more power. I knew plenty. They openly admitted it. And lots of those principals became superintendents. Larry Cuban may well have been one of the good ones, but I’ve met more who just weren’t very good and who had no guiding educational philosophy whatsoever.
When I first became a teacher, I sent students to school board and board of supervisors meetings in the Virginia locality where I taught. These were, after all, public meetings. Members of both boards wanted to know – Gasp! – why students were there. I explained. The school superintendent “explained” to me why it wasn’t such a good idea. This was the same superintendent who — when asked why male teachers had to wear ties year-round, even though parts of the high school were (at the time) without any air conditioning — stoked up his pipe, puffed on it, blew out a cloud of smoke, and then said, “You know maybe we could have a 90 degree rule. When the temperature gets above 90, they can loosen their neckties.” Stupid sometimes is beyond fixing.
When the state of Virginia was working to create an interdisciplinary curriculum that was performance-based and that included a central component of democratic citizenship, I can recall several prominent superintendents discussing to the state superintendent why this could be a “problem” for them. Teachers might get “ideas.” It might open up a “can of worms.”
I often received dictates from the central office as to why a new policy or “initiative” was being introduced or implemented, and often “research” was cited. I knew enough and read enough to know that the “research” being cited was bogus. When I questioned it, central office administrators deflected, or came up with a new “rationale” or just stopped citing the “research.” In one locality, the superintendent cited “research” to justify the creation of a new STEM Math and Science Academy. When I asked for the “research” citations, the superintendent couldn’t provide any, and referred me to the already-hired Academy director, He couldn’t provide any either. Meanwhile, I had lots of solid research to show that STEM academies were not needed and that the US already had a glut of STEM workers. The Academy not only was started, but just a few years after, all of that localities were turned into STEM “academies.”
Meanwhile, because I asked questions, and because I did my homework, I got labeled as a “troublemaker” and as “the enemy.” It helped that I was good at what I did, and I had a doctorate, and I’d taught the kids of some “influential” people who liked me.
I can also recall – during that time when Virginia was working on its new curriculum – that a colleague asked a group of elementary teachers to design their “perfect” school, and they essentially came up with what a state-wide committee was drafting.. Then somebody asked, “But when do we teach long division?” and it all came apart. Something similar happened when I asked high school teachers to do the same, and someone asked, “But what about AP classes?” Yeah, what about them? Research finds that they’re more hype than educationally beneficial. PSATs and SATs? May as well use shoe size. But the drumbeat of nonsense goes on.
I still honestly believe that central purpose of public education is and ought to be democratic citizenship. University of Chicago social scientist Earl Johnson democratic citizenship “the supreme end of education in a democracy.” What Aristotle said is quite true: “the character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarch creates oligarchy, and always the better the character, the better the government.” If the proof is in the political pudding, one need only read the morning papers…or for that matter, the Traitor-inChief’s Twitter rants, which have only gotten weirder and more dangerous by the day.
Public schooling – and public higher education – has a responsibility to educate so that citizens can be members of “an impartial jury.” It has an obligation to teach what the ancients knew and what public policy research makes absolutely clear, that “the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.” Need proof? Climate change.
But we cannot achieve the critical mission of public education if administrators dictate goofiness, and if school boards are not educated even half as well as we expect our students to be — and often they’re clueless: I once had a school board chairwoman tell me that the PSAT and SAT were unrelated…and another time, when a school board chair complained to me about phone call complaints from teachers, I replied, “Teachers have first amendment rights, too.” and the response was – and I’m not even kidding – “They do?”
Gordon Hullfish and Philip Smith considered critical intelligence –– “reflective reconstruction of knowledge, insights and values” –– absolutely essential to the maintenance of a democratic society. This means that citizens can not only think in terms of the scientific method but also they can apply that critical reasoning to a framework based on core democratic values. This is why John Adams wrote that “the whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it.” It’s why Thomas Jefferson wanted public schools, warning that “kings, priests and nobles … will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.” No kidding…
If we don’t commit to a larger vision and a bigger purpose, not too many “lives of individual students” are really going to be changed anyway.
Now, I can assure readers, the larger vision and bigger purpose is NOT Advanced Placement.
Students often load up on AP courses because parents and teachers and guidance counselors have told them they have to do it.
Former Stanford School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek wrote in 2002 that AP courses were nothing more than “test preparation courses,” that too often “contradict everything we know about engaging instruction.” That was echoed in a comprehensive 2002 study by the National Research Council, which concluded that “existing programs for advanced study [AP] are frequently inconsistent with the results of the research on cognition and learning.” And a four-year study at the University of California found that while AP is increasingly an “admissions criterion,” there is no evidence that the number of AP courses taken in high school has any relationship to performance in college.
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”
College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”
In fact, the unintended consequences of pushing more AP may lead to just the reverse. As 2010 book on AP points out “research…suggests that many of the efforts to push the program into more schools — a push that has been financed with many millions in state and federal funds — may be paying for poorly-prepared students to fail courses they shouldn’t be taking in the first place…not only is money being misspent, but the push may be skewing the decisions of low-income high schools that make adjustments to bring the program in — while being unable to afford improvements in other programs.”
Do some students “benefit” from taking AP courses and tests? Sure. But, students who benefit the most are “students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college.”
So, why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to do so. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s become a rather depraved stupid circle.
One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if I didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school. Or else, the admissions board will be concerned that you didn’t take on a “rigorous course load.” AP is a scam to get money, but there’s no way around it. In my opinion, high schools should get rid of them…”
What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see “DBQ” ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.” And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.” Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests:
An AP reader, one of those “experts” cited so often by Jay Mathews at The Post when he gushes over AP, related this about the types of essays he saw:
“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”
A 2013 study from Stanford notes that “increasingly, universities seem to be moving away from awarding credit for AP courses.” The study pointed out that “the impact of the AP program on various measures of college success was found to be negligible.” And it adds this: “definitive claims about the AP program and its impact on students and schools are difficult to substantiate.”
But you wouldn’t know that by reading Andrea Gabor or Jay Mathews, or his colleague at The Post, Nick Anderson, or by listening to the College Board, which derives more than half of its income from AP. Interestingly, Advanced Placement is now also tied tightly to STEM, which, in turn, is tied to the Common Core, which at its outset claimed on the Common Core website that is was necessarily imperative for America and American kids to “compete in the global marketplace.” Andrea Gabor echoes that claim, and it is demonstrably false.
A 2004 RAND study “found no consistent and convincing evidence that the federal government faces current or impending shortages of STEM workers…there is little evidence of such shortages in the past decade or on the horizon.” The RAND study concluded “if the number of STEM positions or their attractiveness is not also increasing” –– and both are not –– then “measures to increase the number of STEM workers may create surpluses, manifested in unemployment and underemployment.”
A 2007 study by Lowell and Salzman found no STEM shortage. Indeed, Lowell and Salzman found that “the supply of S&E-qualified graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally. Further, the number of undergraduates completing S&E studies has grown, and the number of S&E graduates remains high by historical standards.” The “education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand.”
Lowell and Salzman concluded that “labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anecdotal and not supported by available evidence…The assumption that difficulties in hiring is just due to supply can have counterproductive consequences: an increase in supply that leads to high unemployment, lowered wages, and decline in working conditions will have the long-term effect of weakening future supply.” Lowell and Salzman noted that “evidence indicates an ample supply of students whose preparation and performance has been increasing over the past decades.”
Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement recently in the Columbia Journalism Review:
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students…according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
Michael Teitelbaum summed it all up well in The Atlantic: “The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce.”
Teitelbaum added this:
“A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher…All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”
The U.S. is usually ranked as one of the top nations in economic competitiveness.
When it dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the World Economic Forum for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt. In 2012-13 the U.S. dropped to 7th place, with the WEF citing factors such as increasing inequality” and a ”the business community critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong” and a “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
Does anyone think that public schools had anything to do with these problems?
What DID happen is that in the last four years of the Obama tenure, the federal deficit was significantly reduced. Under Dood-Frank, corporate auditing and reporting standards were bolstered, and macroeconomic stability was, well, stabilized. Unemployment was dramatically reduced. Jobs increased. The result?
In the latest World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings, the U.S. is #1.
http://reports.weforum.org/global-competitiveness-report-2018/competitiveness-rankings/
Does anyone think that Advanced Placement courses and tests had a single thing to do with this?
We are now at a place and time when the American Republic in is peril. Anyone who thinks that AP courses (and tests) are the way out just hasn’t been paying attention.
I posted this real-world problem the other day too:
“In June , a review commissioned by the school system confirmed what Thompson and others had believed all along: Students of color had to operate within a ‘hostile learning environment.’…Last week, Loudoun School Board members condemned white supremacy and passed a resolution denouncing hate. They also vowed to eliminate ‘opportunity gaps’ for students from marginalized communities. In its declaration, the School Board also promised to work to address implicit biases in schools and to build a more diverse workforce.”
In case you don’t know, Loudoun County, Virginia is one of the most affluent counties in the United States, usually listed as the MOST affluent county.
Now, how is the Loudoun board going to accomplish what it says it wants, if democratic citizenship and its core elements are not the central focus?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/loudoun-school-board-condemns-racism-hate-after-report-documents-discrimination-in-schools/2019/09/27/5f0db46c-dfb6-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html
Now what I will bet is this; one of the ways that Loudoun administrators and the Loudoun School board will address the issue of “learning gaps” and “implicit biases” is to try and get more minority students to take AP.
God bless you for telling the truth, Democracy! I wish more parents would see that College Board is a business and AP is a “product” to be sold. The grand prize at the end is a “5”….whatever the heck that means since most people don’t understand the grading behind the test. It is “curriculum in a can”. Teachers take courses ($) so that they can teach AP (for extra $). College Board has thrown competition into the helicopter/lawn mower parent craze to create this frenzy to be better, smarter, stronger etc. It is free market forces being pushed onto children (often via parents, teachers, and counselors). It’s no better than cigarette companies marketing Joe Cool tshirts and “swag” to promote that Camel cigarettes are cool.
democracy,
I do not understand why Andrea Gabor’s post is being mischaracterized as an endorsement of AP classes. She noted that one course had been revised to include civics and she took the time to look at what was included and then praised it.
She also praised some civics classes that were NOT Advanced Placement courses in other high schools.
I read your post and I am very confused. On the one hand, you are saying that students — even if they are learning something in the AP course — treat the AP Exam as a joke and don’t care at all about doing well, clearly because it does not matter as the exam is NOT “high stakes” to them.
Meanwhile, other kids are pressured to get 5s on the exam to get into a very selective college.
To my mind, that isn’t a bad thing! Some students don’t care about the exam and that is fine – they don’t have to worry about “failing” a history class because they failed the AP Exam. The teacher will give the student whatever grade he or she wants to give him and the AP Exam is irrelevant. It’s actually an excellent thing that the scores aren’t available until mid-summer, after all the final year grades are in. Some high schools don’t even require students to take the AP Exam if they don’t want to.
The experience of many high school students is that not infrequently the grades some teachers give them in class can be quite arbitrary. While some schools may hold teachers to a very strict rubric, I don’t think teachers like that! And how do they assess “class participation” when it is 30% of a grade?
I don’t think it is such a terrible thing that the kid who sits quietly in the back of the class and never gets those extra bonus points that the kids that the teacher likes more gets can prove via another means outside the classroom that he knows the material.
NY parent:
Maybe because the subtitle is this: “Kudos to the College Board for reviving interest in a neglected subject…”
Or because the first sentence of the article is this: “The College Board, which administers college entrance exams to high school students, is trying to use its advanced placement courses and tests for high-achieving students to get American schools to take civics seriously again.”
Or because LOTS of readers WILL – in fact – take the article as an implicit endorsement of AP.
I am confused both by your comment here and by your other comments embracing AP, and thus – indirectly – the College Board.
democracy,
You misunderstand the difference between “embracing” and noting the absolutely true fact that you have offered nothing except some miracle curriculum which I must accept is far superior to the AP curriculum.
And I am telling you my own experience — that in the real world many students go to high schools that don’t have the manpower to design their own engaging curriculum that is superior to the AP. And in my kid’s experience with both AP and non-AP classes, the AP class was far more interesting and engaging.
The non-AP history and government classes use textbooks, too. Your point would be a lot stronger if you actually listed a non-AP textbook or curriculum that you find more engaging.
I don’t really care whether a class has “AP branding” or not. I just care about an interesting curriculum and I’m sorry I don’t trust “let the teachers invent it themselves” without having some frame of reference to counteract the fact that the non-AP classes are even less interesting and use boring textbooks that are NOT superior to what is taught in the AP classes my kid has taken.
I am very supportive of the union, but I can tell you that there are some public high school teachers who have been teaching social studies forever and do a horrible job and refuse to change. That teacher had no interest in teaching an AP class because that would interfere with his/her desire to do nothing all day and never being called to task since the teacher could randomly assign grades based on which kid he/she liked the most. At least an AP class with all its imperfections is designed to teach a reasonably interesting curriculum. I’d rather wait to throw it out until I know that something at least as good will replace it.
Thank you for all these thoughtful responses. I would like to point out that my piece in no way serves as an endorsement of the College Board or its AP courses and exams. (And, no, I am not paid by the College Board!) The AP U.S. History standards were the “news peg”—that is, the excuse, in laymen’s terms–for doing this piece for Bloomberg. And it was meant to point out that EVEN the test-focused College Board has figured out that civic action is important. Most of the article focused on other—mostly student-led—examples of civic action.
I might add that I am a big fan of experiential learning, which I agree is “inefficient.” I know this first hand: A colleague and I are in the midst of a months-long process of designing a political-reporting class, including lining up speakers, itinerary, and interview opportunities, for students who will travel with us to El Paso to cover the 2020 elections from the border as part of an “experiential” political reporting class. Our students will be required to read a thick packet of articles and research on politics in the Southwest, during their winter break, before the class begins. This is our fourth such class: We went twice to Cuba during the Obama/Castro détente and in spring ’18 we took students to Maine to cover the midterm elections from a swing district that had voted twice for Obama and then for Trump. Our students tell us the experiences are transformational; we see from their writing and multimedia projects and from the journalism jobs and graduate studies they undertake after graduation the impact it has had on them. Not incidentally, the work they do for these classes has won multiple national awards for best student journalism. Inefficiency, I believe, is part of the genius of such experiences.
Maybe then the focus of your article should have been not just “civics” by democratic citizenship. And maybe there should have been ONE sentence that said something like, “Well, hell, even the College Board seems to have figured out that democratic citizenship is, you know, pretty doggoned important.”
Instead, it read like a flat-out endorsement of both AP and the College Board.
And that’s no bueno.