The Best High Schools

At the center of the change is a bespectacled education researcher named Clifford Adelman. Adelman works for the U.S. Education Department, where he is known for intense irritability at judgments and policies based on sloppy data. For the last several years, in both his cluttered office in southwestern Washington, D.C., and the second-floor study at his house in Kensington, Md., he has been chipping away at what he considers flawed assumptions about why minority students struggle in college.

His resulting study, "Answers in the Tool Box," examines the academic records of a large cohort of 13,000 students who were followed from the 10th grade in 1980 until they were about 30 in 1993. It shows that despite the emphasis college-admissions officers place on high-school grades and scores and class rank, those are not the strongest predictors of college completion. What matters instead is how rigorous and challenging students' high-school courses are, no matter what grades they receive. And the factor is particularly important in predicting the success of minority students. Courses like AP and IB, Adelman says, help develop what he calls "self-directed learning skills." When well taught, he says, such courses "put students in the position of setting up their own experiments, searching for their own specialized materials. You don't necessarily learn that in a regular high-school course."

Teachers and counselors often tell students to put off the most difficult subjects, like calculus, until college. Adelman's study suggests that is the wrong advice. Freeman's and Daniel's high schools, for instance, were essentially telling them this: we can't keep you from going to college, but we will deprive you of a learning experience that will help you succeed when you get there. An official at Freeman's school says AP enrollment was limited because the course, with its recommended small class size, was expensive to teach. Officials at Daniel's school district failed to respond to telephone calls and faxes seeking an explanation.

With minority preferences in university admissions abolished in California, Texas and Washington and retreating elsewhere, federal and state education officials have decided the best way to help disadvantaged students is to give them a shot at thought-provoking high-school courses. The Clinton administration spent $15 million last year on cutting AP and IB test fees, increasing training for teachers and making more courses available. The administration has asked Congress for $20 million this year, including money to put AP courses online.

States are promising more money for districts that want to expand their AP and IB offerings. Fairfax County in northern Virginia took the unusual step last year of spending $1.2 million to make sure it would have no Rasheda Daniels denied a chance to take an AP test. It paid everyone's $76 test fees and required that all AP students take the examinations. (This has long been the rule with IB.) Fairfax superintendent Daniel Domenech urged schools to let in any student who wanted the challenge.

This is not a popular approach among teachers. They say some students do not develop the intellectual capability to handle such courses until they are older. They complain of ambitious parents' pushing their children into courses in which they have no interest.