HOW TO BUILD A BETTER HIGH SCHOOL

A few private high schools have discarded AP altogether. Bruce Hammond, director of college counseling at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, N.M., has found a dozen schools, including his own, --that have rejected, or are about to reject, AP in favor of designing their own courses. Many teachers agree that instead of focusing on a standardized curriculum like AP, they should concentrate on making lessons exciting, well taught and linked to students' lives. "The troubles that arise in high schools are precisely an extension of the lack of intellectual vigor--forget rigor--in the elementary-school curriculum and pedagogy," says Deborah Meier, founder of a small East Harlem high school that succeeded in motivating low-income students by emphasizing discussion and writing.

But superintendents, principals and many teachers in districts that have increased their commitment to college-level courses say even with their shortcomings, AP and IB are the most effective ways to take a demanding curriculum to the widest range of students. The tests have an incorruptible high standard, since a teacher cannot dumb down the final exams, and some AP and IB courses appear to be bet-ter than the college courses they substitute for. Luther Spoehr, lecturer in education and history at Brown University, says the AP American-history course "is one of the last places where students can get a survey course that really insists that they try to understand change over substantial periods of time." Jon Reider, guidance counselor at San Francisco University High School and a former Stanford admissions officer, believes that because of smaller classes, better student motivation and more-experienced instructors, "calculus is almost always better taught in high school than in college."

The message is getting out... slowly. This month, 1,173,000 students are scheduled to take 2,050,000 AP tests. That's double the number of students and triple the number of tests since 1995. Still, the new total of AP test takers is only about 15 percent of high-school juniors and seniors, and some studies suggest that may be one reason that so many students who start college find they do not have the academic muscles to survive and get a degree. University of California researchers Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices, for instance, reported last year that 54.9 percent of California students who took the SAT in 2002 had not taken advanced classes in high school, including AP, IB or honors courses.

That's a major problem because some large studies, such as an analysis by the National Center for Educational Accountability of Texas state-college data, suggest that even students who do poorly on AP tests have significantly higher college-graduation rates than those who do not take AP tests at all. In public schools where average parental income is low and minority students are numerous, enthusiasm for AP and IB has never been greater. "Only 17 percent of our parents have attended college," says Brian Rodriguez, the AP coordinator at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., "but AP has had a tremendous impact here, as we regularly send kids to Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Berkeley and UCLA who never would have had a chance to go there even six years ago."

Raising expectations clearly inspires many students. Sharon Alford, a junior at the Jefferson County IB School, looked at the regular high school in Cullman, Ala., when her father, a Methodist minister, was transferred there in 2003. Cullman High had no AP courses, and though it started AP chemistry the next year, and plans on adding more courses, that was too late for her. So at 6:30 a.m. each school day, Alford climbs into the family's white Ford Explorer, with her mother at the wheel. She finishes her homework while chewing on a Pop-Tart or cereal bar during the hourlong drive to Jefferson County IB. On the ride back in the afternoon, she tries to nap. Adults who hear of her two-hour commute to and from high school are astonished. Her friends make fun of her. But, she says, her response is always the same: "I really, really wanted to go there." It's just the first stop on a journey that she hopes will someday take her as far as she wants to go.

© 2005