Shock Therapy

Why is everyone at Bell Multicultural High School in D.C. taking Advanced Placement English courses and tests? Most of the students are low-performing, with parents who don't speak English at home. In the past, no one even considered requiring such students to tackle the long reading lists and tough vocabulary of college-level AP.

Yet Bell Multicultural is not alone in pushing what seem to be ill-prepared students into the program. In the course of compiling its 2009 Top U.S. High Schools list, NEWSWEEK has discovered schools across the country adopting this form of academic shock treatment. Instead of the traditional approach—remediating low-achieving students, building their skills slowly—some schools with significant numbers of low-income students are giving the full AP dose of frequent writing assignments and three-hour exams to nearly everyone.

 

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Only in that way, administrators and teachers at these schools say, can their students—like football players running up and down stadium steps—build the necessary intellectual muscle for college. "It has provided an academic foundation for the school," says Bruce Hensel, administrator of Hogan Preparatory Academy in Kansas City, Mo., where 80 percent of the students are low-income, 65 percent take AP and only 1 percent last year passed the AP tests.

Those trying the shock treatment agree that it won't work in math or foreign language, where preparatory courses are essential. But nearly every other AP subject essentially requires only an ability to read and a willingness to study hard. Waiting until students are clearly ready won't work, the innovators say, because they are dealing with struggling minority students who many educators, and many of the students themselves, don't think can ever be ready. The only chance for many students to develop the necessary skills is to jump into AP, proponents say.

There is little data yet on whether this works, and there are plenty of skeptics. "Having failing students take AP courses as a solution to their academic struggles is like promoting a poor-hitting minor-league ballplayer to the New York Yankees in the hope that it will jump-start his career if he faces major-league pitching," says J. Martin Rochester, a political-science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who writes often on education. "It is not just a leap of faith but a leap of logic."

Florida Times-Union reporters Topher Sanders and Mary Kelli Palka revealed in May that in the four lowest-performing Duval County (Jacksonville) high schools, only 6 percent of the AP exams resulted in passing scores. "Students whose latest Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores showed they couldn't read at grade level filled 29 percent of the seats last year in Duval's AP classes," they reported. "Some students even attended remedial reading classes at the same time they were in AP classes such as U.S. history and English language."