In Defense of AP Classes...

A friend of mine recently posted a link to an article titled "AP Classes Are a Scam" from The Atlantic.  The article details several reasons why its author John Tierney dislikes the AP system.  I disagreed with every single one of them.  I went to a very good public high school.  As a teacher, I'm aware that my school was not the norm; I did my student teaching in a vastly different district.  However, choosing to take as many AP classes as possible was one of the best decisions I've made in my life.  I ended up taking American History, World History, American Government, English Language, English Literature, Macro Econ, and Spanish tests.  I also took a semester of Calc AB, but I ended up transferring into a different class mid-year because I didn't need any more math credits and I didn't think I'd do well enough on the AP test.  I was well-prepared for the AP tests at the end of the year and I did well.  I picked up a couple of 5s, some 4s, and one 3, which has always been a source of annoyance for me.

Those scores earned me an entire year's worth of college credit.  Credit-wise, I was a sophomore the first day I set foot on campus.  I finished my undergrad degree in six semesters.  My AP tests had cost around $500 total, but had saved me an entire year of tuition, room and board, and books.  An entire year.  It's not like I went to a community college or a little liberal arts school.  I went to the University of Michigan, which happens to be one of the best public universities in the country (Go Blue!).  If my AP credits were good enough for U of M, they're good enough anywhere.  Later in my college career, I transferred schools to Michigan State University (another pretty large and highly-respected institution).  They gave me even more credits for my AP scores.  To say I'm a believer in the AP system is an understatement.  Transitioning to the college curriculum at Michigan wasn't a challenge at all after the way high school (thanks in large part to my APs) prepared me.  I'd even go so far as to say that my MSU classes were a cakewalk when I transferred there.  On top of that, as I sit here wondering how I'm going to pay off my student loans, I'm beyond thankful that I have several fewer thousands of dollars to worry about thanks to my high school AP classes.

On top of that, my AP classes were where I learned how to write at a high level.  That, more than any skill I picked up in high school, played a major role in my college success.  While other freshmen were struggling with the high page counts and rigorous grading scales that accompanied college-level writing, I felt right at home.  An eight page paper comparing writing styles for my Great Books class?  Please, I wrote a ten page novel comparison in AP English last year.  Blue book exams that required three or four essays on a time limit?  I'd been doing that on AP tests for years.  I'd always been a strong writer (you can thank my English teacher mother for that), but it wasn't until my first AP class that I was really pushed.  That was where I learned how to formulate arguments and really write academic prose.  I'm sure I would've figured it out eventually, but having that skill before I ever set foot on a college campus ensured that I could hit the ground running.

Here are some of Tierney's arguments against the AP system:

AP courses are not, in fact, remotely equivalent to the college-level courses they are said to approximate. Before teaching in a high school, I taught for almost 25 years at the college level, and almost every one of those years my responsibilities included some equivalent of an introductory American government course. The high-school AP course didn't begin to hold a candle to any of my college courses. My colleagues said the same was true in their subjects.

The way material is taught is at the discretion of the teacher.  If Tierney didn't feel that the AP classes he was teaching were at the appropriate level, it was his responsibility to correct that.  In my experience, my AP courses were very challenging and on par with many college classes that I took.  In fact, there were several college classes that I took, particularly at MSU that were easier than classes I had taken in high school.

The traditional monetary argument for AP courses -- that they can enable an ambitious and hardworking student to avoid a semester or even a year of college tuition through the early accumulation of credits -- often no longer holds. Increasingly, students don't receive college credit for high scores on AP courses; they simply are allowed to opt out of the introductory sequence in a major. And more and more students say that's a bad idea, and that they're better off taking their department's courses. 

As I've already noted above, the monetary argument absolutely did hold true for me.  I can't guarantee that admissions standards haven't changed somewhat in the few years since I applied, but being able to escape undergrad with three years' worth of student loans instead of four is a huge deal.  I managed just fine skipping some of the introductory courses at college.  In fact, some of the intro courses that I did take were major wastes of my time and tuition.  I was more than happy to skip as many of them as I could.

The scourge of AP courses has spread into more and more high schools across the country, and the number of students taking these courses is growing by leaps and bounds. Studies show that increasing numbers of the students who take them are marginal at best, resulting in growing failure rates on the exams. The school where I taught essentially had an open-admissions policy for almost all its AP courses. I would say that two thirds of the students taking my class each year did not belong there. And they dragged down the course for the students who did.

I do agree that this is a problem.  When I was student teaching, I sat in on a couple of AP classes and it was very evident that most of the students in there weren't at the level needed to succeed on the AP test.  However, the blame for that doesn't necessarily lie with the College Board or the AP system.  Our high school had certain requirements for entering AP classes.  For any of the English or social studies classes that relied heavily on writing, you had to be in the Honors English track and get a signature from both your English teacher and your last Social Studies Teacher.  For AP Calc, you had to have been in the Honors math track.  I had to have my Spanish teacher's permission to enroll in AP Spanish as well.  There's no reason that this system can't be applied to all schools that offer AP classes.  If schools have open enrollment policies that cause their students to fail AP tests, the blame lies with them.

Despite the rapidly growing enrollments in AP courses, large percentages of minority students are essentially left out of the AP game. And so, in this as in so many other ways, they are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to college admissions.

This is also an issue.  However, the bigger problem lies with the fact that schools in inner city areas that tend to be dominated by minority students perform more poorly in general.  These students, to their great misfortune, are going to be at a competitive disadvantage for college admissions with or without AP tests.  It's a terrible situation, and it's one that doesn't seem likely to change in the near future, but it's not because of AP classes.  If anything, offering AP classes in those types of schools can give top performing students an extra leg up that may just help them get into a university.  Education makes all the difference in the world.  Any extra boost a low-income student can get has the potential to make a major difference.

The AP program imposes "substantial opportunity costs" on non-AP students in the form of what a school gives up in order to offer AP courses, which often enjoy smaller class sizes and some of the better teachers. Schools have to increase the sizes of their non-AP classes, shift strong teachers away from non-AP classes, and do away with non-AP course offerings, such as "honors" courses. These opportunity costs are real in every school, but they're of special concern in low-income school districts.

Again, I attended a fairly unique public high school, so my experiences may not be representative of all schools, but my AP classes were every bit as full as my regular classes.  There was also a substantial Honors program in math and English that were used to feed into the AP program.  My sister still attends the school, and since my graduation, they've added an additional advanced math track to the curriculum.  Don't forget that teachers generally have a great deal of input in the classes that they are assigned to teach.  This is especially true for tenured teachers with a lot of experience.  They're the ones most likely to handle AP classes.  Most of the teachers who teach APs choose to do so.  When I decided to go back to school for a teaching degree, I knew all along that I wanted to teach AP History and Government classes.  I want the ability to cover the material more deeply than the regular history classes do.  I wanted a chance to engage the students on a deeper level.

To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification -- a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.

This could not be further from the truth in my experience.  My first AP class was American History and I fell in love with it.  I'd always had an affinity for history, but that class taught me that it was so much more than learning names and dates and events.  I learned how to piece together cause and effect and look at the long-term impacts of events and decisions, which is an essential skill that applies to almost every facet of real life.  The point about teachers being forced to teach specific items is absolutely true, but it applies to every single classroom in a modern high school.  States and districts have content standards for each subject.  They're massive lists of numbered and bulleted subjects that teachers are required to cover during the course of the school year.  They dictate almost every facet of instruction.  When I did my student teaching in a World History class, we even had a district-wide final exam that we had to tailor our instruction around.  The events and facts that we stressed to our students were the ones found on that exam, not necessarily the ones that we found most engaging.  While we're on the subject of our World History class, we covered all of world history from the 1300s to the present day in just one school year.  The number of important events we simply glossed over was almost heart-breaking.  There was no time for detail or more than lists of names and dates in most cases.  That's not a problem unique to AP classes.  I know for certain that I had a much deeper knowledge of subjects I covered in my AP classes than the type of classroom that I student taught in could ever hope to.