AP Classes Expelled by Elite School
Crossroads in Santa Monica joins a growing movement
against the college-level courses. It plans to develop more challenging
studies.
By Mitchell Landsberg and Rachana Rathi
Times Staff Writers
May 5, 2005
Crossroads School in Santa Monica, which prides itself on offering an
independent, progressive-minded curriculum, plans to join a growing
list of elite private high schools that have stopped providing Advanced
Placement courses, opting instead to develop its own college-level
classes.
The decision, announced to parents and faculty this week, puts
Crossroads in the forefront of a small but gathering backlash against
AP classes by educators who say they find the curriculum limiting and
unimaginative. The change is scheduled to take effect in the 2007-08
school year.
"Crossroads and its faculty prefer courses that prepare students to be
reflective, analytical and ongoing learners," Headmaster Roger Weaver
wrote in a letter to parents. "Classes geared to a specific, externally
designed test do not best achieve this objective."
Advanced Placement courses, begun half a century ago to allow
academically advanced high school students to earn college credits,
have exploded in popularity and importance in recent years. Now offered
in more than 14,000 high schools nationwide, they have become almost a
requirement for students applying to the most selective colleges.
The courses are designed to prepare students to take AP exams offered
by the College Board, which also administers the SAT, the best-known
college entrance exam.
Although a declining number of colleges grant full credit for the
classes, they are viewed as a demonstration that students can perform
at the collegiate level. Moreover, they can bump up a student's grade
point average, because colleges give an extra point to grades earned in
AP classes. This has led to the phenomenon of students earning a grade
point average that is higher than 4 on a 4-point scale.
The classes have also drifted to the center of a national debate over
educational equity. Inner-city schools, where students tend to be black
and Latino, are far less likely than suburban schools to offer a full
range of AP courses, and grass-roots movements have sprung up in many
cities, including Los Angeles, to demand them.
In an interview, Weaver took pains not to criticize those who champion
the AP curriculum.
"Our decision is not a decision about whether the AP is a good thing or
a bad thing," he said. "It's about whether the AP is the right thing
for our school."
But he also quoted critics who have said the AP courses are "a mile
wide and an inch deep" and discourage a more thorough, critical
examination of a subject.
Students and administrators at some schools agreed, applauding
Crossroads' decision.
"Honestly, I don't feel like I learned a lot from my AP classes," said
Beejoli Shah, a senior at Whitney High School in Cerritos, a public
school that is consistently ranked among the best in the country. She
said she had taken six AP classes.
"I just feel like it was a lot of material crammed into eight months as
opposed to the full school year of 10 months," said Shah, who plans to
attend UC Berkeley in the fall.
She said she took fewer AP classes than many of her classmates. "And
there are people who buy a book and start studying a month before the
exam. It's not a good judge of how much you've learned in an entire
year."
Mary Johnson, assistant principal at San Marino High School, called
Crossroads' decision courageous, but added that it was easier for a
private school to abandon Advanced Placement courses.
"In public schools, we're dealing with a much larger public," she said.
"And in some cases, it's a public that values the AP above all. They've
really bought the idea that this is the thing to prepare their kids for
college."
Johnson said there has been widespread discussion by high school
counselors, college admissions officials and the College Board about
what purpose the AP program serves, particularly because many
universities no longer offer college credit for AP tests.
She said she doubted that many schools would follow Crossroads' lead.
"But," she said, "I tell you, you get enough high-profile private
schools saying, 'We don't need this. Our curriculum is rigorous
enough,' and you may just see a wave happening."
Crossroads is not the first school to replace its AP curriculum.
Several prestigious private schools in the Northeast, including
Fieldston and Dalton in New York City, decided several years ago to
dump AP and develop their own college-level courses. Others, such as
the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, have long sandwiched AP
material within courses that are intended to be deeper and more
rigorous than the College Board requirements.
Such schools, which enjoy an enviable reputation among admissions
officers at elite colleges, say their students have never been
penalized for taking courses that don't precisely match the AP
curriculum.
Administrators from Fieldston wrote in 2002 that, after their first
year without AP, more students were admitted to highly selective
colleges than had been the case for years.
Among the California institutions to pave the way for Crossroads is the
Midland School, a small coeducational boarding school in Santa Barbara
County that decided to drop AP courses two years ago.
John Lourie, the head of the school, said he has no regrets. "We are
more able to spend time on longer-term projects, approach our courses
more thematically and do more team teaching," he said. "It's just freed
much more opportunity for us to do these things."
Trevor Packer, executive director of the College Board's Advanced
Placement program, said he knows of only a dozen schools over the last
three years that have decided to stop offering AP courses, and he added
that they continue to offer the exams.
All of them are private college-prep schools with the resources to
develop their own courses that will offer the same rigor as those
developed by the College Board and will prepare a student to pass a
corresponding AP exam, he said.
A school with those kinds of resources might want to offer a course on
the Vietnam War as depicted in film, for example, or emphasize the
labor movement instead of offering a broad survey course on American
history, Packer said.
The few public schools that have suspended participation have done so
because their students fared poorly, and they usually rejoin the
program once they have improved instruction and taken other steps to
increase their students' chances of success, he said.
Packer said the AP program remains popular, with several hundred new
schools joining during the three-year period in which some private
schools dropped out. He said "study after study" has shown successful
participation in one or more AP classes to be a strong predictor of a
student's success in college.
Before making its decision, Crossroads surveyed 200 colleges and
universities nationwide, and was assured by 90% of them that Crossroads
students would not be penalized for taking advanced courses that
diverged from the AP curriculum, Weaver said.
He said the school would have its new courses certified by the
University of California so that students could still get the grade
boost for college-level work. And he said that Crossroads would
continue to offer AP tests to students who wanted to take them.
Crossroads currently offers 14 Advanced Placement courses and 13 other
honors courses. Some classes may change little, Weaver said. A new
calculus class, for instance, would probably be quite similar to AP
calculus and would prepare students for the AP test. In other cases,
however, he said Crossroads intends to develop classes that bear little
resemblance to existing AP courses.
As an example, he cited biology, which he said is among the AP classes
that he considers superficial. In its place, he envisions something
like Marine Biology of the Urban California Coast, which could be a
multidisciplinary class requiring students to dig deeply into the
biology of their immediate environment.
He said the school's faculty will begin shortly to develop the new
curriculum, "one that will provide students a rigorous, innovative and
engaging experience."
Times staff writer Jean Merl contributed to this report.
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