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9486 in the collection
Auditors reject good teachers' AP syllabuses
Librarian Comment: This is why I left teaching. After 5 evaluations, in my seventh year as a librarian and three total revisions of lesson plans to follow their templates, my instructional assistant evaluation was that I had to change my Bloom's verb at the end of my objective sentence to the beginning of the objective sentence or my students would not listen to me.
I was a teacher/librarian. When were students looking at my lesson plans as a librarian, working with students in 15-45 minute time frames for such a statement to have any validity? It certainly would not change what I was doing.
by Jay Mathews
WASHINGTON -- Students of David Keener, an ex-priest who teaches at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., almost always pass the Advanced Placement biology exam. So when the teacher submitted a description of his course for the College Board's first quality-control audit of the AP program, nobody thought there would be a problem.
A clean audit was also expected for Frazier O'Leary of Cardozo High School in Washington D.C. The College Board has often asked the highly regarded AP English teacher, who has long experience in urban education, to help train others to meet the challenge of teaching at a college level.
Yet Keener, O'Leary and other AP veterans in the last few months have met with a surprising initial response from auditors: rejection. Most ultimately win approval, but the new audits begun this year have rubbed raw the already bruised relations between some high school AP teachers and the college professors who are rating them.
School officials say auditors have penalized teachers for trivial omissions and sometimes have failed to read the course descriptions carefully. The teachers involved say they are willing to rewrite the descriptions but wonder why their records of classroom achievement are ignored.
College Board officials say 51 percent of the 132,433 AP teachers who have been audited so far say the process has improved their courses. The officials acknowledge that some rejections have been for small flaws, but they say corrections are easy to make and 90 percent of all submissions have been approved.
The New York-based College Board is a nonprofit association of schools, colleges, universities and other organizations that provides, among other services, the SAT and AP testing programs. The audit has had a big impact in the Washington area, which has the highest AP test participation in the country. Faye Brenner, advanced academic program specialist for Fairfax County, Va., schools, said her teachers are patiently making changes and resubmitting course descriptions, or syllabuses, but many are not happy about the red tape.
"What is frustrating is that this is an exercise in paperwork and may not always reflect what is going on in the classroom," she said.
Exacerbating the friction is the fact that 95 percent of the auditors are college introductory course instructors, working on campuses where AP is a growing threat to their revenue and, sometimes, their self-respect. From 1999 to 2007, the number of AP exams with scores high enough to qualify students for college credit, thus enabling them to skip some introductory college courses, doubled to 1.5 million.
AP is the country's largest program of college-level courses taught in high school. Such courses are virtually required for applicants to selective colleges. They are popular with students, who say that they have made it easier to adjust to college academic demands, but many college and university officials have reacted to the perceived threat to their introductory courses by cutting back credit for AP. Some complain that high school teachers cannot match the level of instruction their faculty provide.
The AP audit was designed in part to buttress the argument that AP courses -- coupled with the AP exams -- are just as good as college introductory courses. Many high school administrators say AP is even better because it has teachers such as Keener and O'Leary, who are more experienced in adjusting to different learning styles and have more time with students than the overburdened graduate students and professors who handle introductory courses in the state universities where most Americans get their degrees.
Some AP teachers complain that their college professor auditors are not only ignorant of the teaching records of the people they are auditing but are alarmingly inconsistent in their judgments. Patrick Welsh, an AP English teacher at T.C. Williams who has been recruited many times by the College Board to grade AP exams, called it a "bureaucratic mess." He said he and three other teachers submitted identical syllabuses for an AP English Literature course they are teaching this year. One syllabus was accepted. The other three, including his, were rejected. When three teachers in Fairfax submitted the same syllabus, one was accepted, one rejected with three suggested revisions and one rejected with eight suggested revisions.
College Board officials said such situations were rare. In 95 percent of the cases, they said, different auditors agree when shown the same syllabus.
Welsh said auditors seemed to be nitpicking rather than looking for information the College Board needs to know about an AP teacher. "One of the teachers who got a rejection back from the College Board said that she didn't include an explanation of how she was going to teach vocabulary," Welsh said. College Board officials said the auditors are simply looking for evidence of criteria developed by 6,000 AP teachers and 4,000 college professors.
Trevor Packer, College Board vice president for AP, said he was well aware of college faculty skepticism about AP teachers, which he said "is almost always based on complete and total ignorance of AP courses and exams." One important reason for the audit, he said, was to show college instructors how good AP actually is. He said surveys show the college reviewers "are coming away from the AP course audit inspired by the quality of the AP courses."
Another important reason for the audit, Packer said, was the need to bring AP teachers up to date on changes in topics that will appear on the three-hour exams in May. The exams are written and graded by outside experts. "When AP Comparative Government and Politics introduced the study of the Iranian government in 2006," he said, "we saw that hundreds of teachers of all experience levels ... failed to incorporate the new content in their courses, completely unaware that the course had changed, even though we mailed the new course materials to every AP school."
Packer said that if the audit examined each teacher's record on exam scores, as some AP teachers suggested, "it would put inappropriate pressure on schools to deny entry into AP courses for students very able to benefit from a college-level class but uncertain of earning the top marks on the end-of-course AP exam."
O'Leary, of Cardozo High, said his syllabus was rejected because he didn't include exercises, such as his students' close analysis of the writing of novelist Edward P. Jones. He quickly added them and won approval. The process, he said, "validates what we are trying to do here," but he thinks that "the best way to see if the course works is the students' success in college."
Keener, of T.C. Williams, said his class description also was approved after he clarified two points. Last year, 29 of his AP biology students got the top grade, a 5. Eleven got 4s and two received 3s, the lowest score that can earn college credit. None of his students scored below a 3.
"In evaluating whether a course is truly on the AP level, I wish student performance had been included in some way," he said.
— Jay Mathews, with comment by a librarian
Daily Herald
2007-09-02
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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