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3 Cheers for To Shaffer for Exposing the Rot of AP Courses

Ohanian Comment: Fie on Jay Mathews for not being able to see the kids hurt.

Tom Shaffer's first e-mail to me, after his high school appeared on my list of America's best high schools in Newsweek.com, grabbed my attention, to say the least.

"In my considered opinion," he wrote, "you and your survey are the worst thing that happened to education traceable to a single individual in the 30 years I taught. I only regret that I did not give you a harder time when we sat across a table at Charles County Community College 5 years ago and, like Hitler, it was still possible to stop you. You have ruined careers, discouraged bright students and laid waste to AP programs. A pox on you!"

To someone not familiar with teachers, particularly the discourse of some of the more exciting classroom performers, such a message seems like something to show to the local police, or at least delete as fast as possible. But I learned long ago that every educator has something to teach me. Even the outwardly tough ones, like Shaffer, turn into pussycats if you make it clear that you, like an attentive class, want to listen to them.

So I e-mailed Shaffer back, asking him to tell me more. As I anticipated, he stopped comparing me to horrid dictators and began to give me lots of details, even stopping by my office for a long chat.

I don't agree with much of what Shaffer said, but he appears to have been a fine Advanced Placement history teacher for several years, and such people deserve attention. He is particularly important, at least in my view, because he is one of the few Advanced Placement teachers I have ever met who is not enthusiastic about that program and the current efforts in school districts like his to coax as many students as possible into the college level AP courses. He is also worth my time because his opinion of AP is still the majority view in American schools. Most educators appear to agree with him that AP and a comparable program, International Baccalaureate (IB), should be reserved for just A students and that most B and C students are not ready for such hard work in high school.

I want to share Shaffer's story of how he came to hate the expansion of AP so much that he quit his job at Thomas Stone High School in Waldorf, Md., before I get into the broader significance of his experience and his views for the future of AP, which, as far as I can tell after 20 years of watching it closely, has done more to improve U.S. high schools than any other program during that period.

Shaffer was born 62 years ago this Friday in Youngstown, Ohio. His father was a steelworker and his mother worked in a department store. He said the only reason he ever showed up at Youngstown South High School was to pursue young women. He served in the Army for three years and spent several years working at an assortment of jobs, including reading gas meters, while he attended college in California. He got a degree in history from California State University-Los Angeles in 1968 and was a social worker for awhile. Then he started teaching elementary school and middle school in Pennsylvania and California.

He came to Maryland in 1981 to research a book about John Wilkes Booth, and decided high school teaching would be a good job for him. He first taught English at La Plata High School and then in 1988 began teaching Advanced Placement European history at McDonough High School in the rapidly growing suburban district of Charles County, southeast of Washington, D.C.

Advanced Placement courses were originally desired to allow precocious high schoolers to earn college credit so they could skip introductory courses when they reached university. Most American educators, like Shaffer, still emphasize that traditional role. He often told McDonough students they were wasting their time if they were not ready to work hard, take the AP test in May and score high enough--a 3 or above on the test's 5-point scoring scale--to earn that college credit. He followed the same procedure when he moved to Thomas Stone High in Waldorf in 1999, but many of the students there did not believe he would be as demanding as he promised. When word got out of what happened to those two class--lots of Ds and Fs--he found only eight students willing to take the course from him the following year. A heart attack slowed him down, but he got through the year and six of those students took the AP exam.

About that time the school's new principal, Heath Morrison, called a meeting of all AP teachers. He said that district superintendent James E. Richmond had decided that the school district had to greatly expand its AP offerings, as other Washington area districts had done, and he wanted AP teachers to start recruiting more students for their courses. There was research from Clifford Adelman of the U.S. Education Department showing that the best predictor of college completion was not good high school grades or test scores, but how many challenging courses a student had taken in high school. Richmond said he did not want any student denied a chance to take AP classes just because their sophomore year grades had been poor or they did not come from college-conscious families.

Despite Shaffer's reluctance to teach more than a few very well-prepared AP students and his reputation as a taskmaster, he had no trouble finding more AP students. While he was teaching just eight seniors in AP European History that year, he had 100 juniors in his honors World History course. Many of them enjoyed his acerbic classroom comments and appreciated his love of the subject matter. He was not boring, so they signed up for AP European history their senior year, even as he warned them it would be a rough ride.

He had about 40 students in two sections. He gave them much to read and much to write. About half got scores of 3 or above on the AP test, which is written and graded by outside experts with no connection to the school. Shaffer's own grades were based not on the test results, which did not arrive until July, but on classroom performance. He said the grades broke down the way they usually did in his classroom, half got As and Bs and half got Ds and Fs.

But despite his success in luring so many into the course and giving them a demanding lesson, he was not happy. "This placing of students in classes for which they are clearly unable or unwilling to do the work has a ripple effect as well that is disastrous," he told me. "Students who could actually learn something in an honors class, say, are now pushed into AP where they fail. Students in classes moving at an appropriate rate for them are pushed into honors classes, and that designation now becomes meaningless."

Shaffer chided the school system for not giving AP teachers an extra planning period to prepare for the demands of their courses. One of his unsuccessful efforts to promote this extra time occurred right after the meeting where I spoke to Charles County teachers about AP and IB in 2001. When the extra period did not come through, he told Morrison he would no longer teach AP. As the 2002-2003 school year began, Shaffer decided to retire.

Despite Shaffer's distress at the changes, he helped produce an extraordinary increase in college level course participation at Thomas Stone. The school gave 129 AP tests in May 2000, but in 2002 had 476, nearly four times as many. The portion of tests graded 3 and above dropped, from 53.5 percent in 2000 to 33.6 percent in 2002. But if you do the arithmetic, not only did many more students get that dose of college trauma prescribed by the Adelman study, but the number of tests with passing scores at Thomas Stone increased by 132 percent, from 69 in 2000 to 160 in 2002. This year the school gave 647 AP tests, with the number of passing scores still being calculated.

Superintendent James E. Richmond said he couldn't disagree with Shaffer more. "The days of five to six students in an AP class are over. We had a lot of kids not being challenged to their fullest potential, and I believe that with the right teachers and academic support, 99 percent of the students can be very successful in more challenging classes like AP. Kids need to be pushed academically."

"We did not just thrust students into these classes," Richmond said. "We provided the resources, time and training needed to make our efforts to increase student participation in AP a success. Stronger participation in AP courses is what is going to add the rigor to our high school program. It is what is going to make the difference for students. It is needed to move us, as a system, to the next level of excellence. It is also a logical outcome of our efforts at the elementary and middle schools to better prepare students for high school."

Morrison, the principal, said when he surveyed his teachers at the end of the school year, they said "one of their top three priorities is to continue the growth and quality of Thomas Stone's AP program." He said in AP recruitment "there has been a particular focus on minority students who are more than capable, but who were never encouraged to take more rigorous classes. Once students are identified, there is an incredible support mechanism in place. We have after-school and computer-assisted instructional support. We want our students to be successful on the AP test, but there is more to taking AP classes than passing the AP test. Our push is to better prepare students for the challenges of getting into college and to be successful once they get there. Taking AP classes in high school helps students reach that goal."

My view of what Thomas Stone has been doing with AP is perfectly expressed by Bill Graves, senior class counselor at the school, in a video report on AP done by students. "You step up to the line as a student and you look across that line and if that line looks a little challenging, then I want you to step across that line and take that challenge," Graves said. "That will make you a better student now, it will prepare you for the future in whatever you do, be it college or the job field, and it will make you a better person because you will have met that challenge."

I think it would be an act of educational malpractice to stop the expansion of AP. That would mean saying to B and C students: "We can't keep you from going to college, but we are going to keep you from taking a course and a test that will help prepare you for college." Shaffer said his honors courses are good substitutes for students who are not quite ready for a college level course, but unfortunately the alternative to AP is usually a disappointment--spoon-fed lectures and 15-minute homework assignments for students who deserve more.

Like almost all the teachers I have ever interviewed, Shaffer is unfailingly honest, even when it works against his argument. He acknowledges that if he had been allowed to limit the number of kids in his AP class, the ones he excluded might not have had as good an academic experience with another teacher in a less rigorous class. He said he thought the demands of AP had caused another teacher at Thomas Stone to quit, but when I noted that he had described her as a dispenser of pedagogical pablum, he nodded and said, "I don't think we are going to miss her."

This is what happens when rapid change comes to schools. Not everyone is happy. And often the new program falls apart. But the beneficial effects of the growth of AP and IB are so clear--particularly in college success for low-income students and minorities who used to be kept out of AP--that I think it is worth the strain and the risk.

And if done well, the change does not have to lead good teachers like Shaffer to bail out. I think he should have gotten his extra planning period. I think that districts like Charles County are obliged to move money from less productive programs to those, like AP, that work.

In our long conversation, Shaffer did not provide me with any concrete evidence that my high school rankings' emphasis on AP and IB participation had ruined any good careers, discouraged any bright students or laid waste to AP programs. Perhaps I have missed something, but during the past 20 years I have encountered a hundred AP teachers eager for more students for every one AP teacher, like Shaffer, who wants less. Having seen first hand the wonders produced by the most enthusiastic apostles of AP, I pray that they are the future, without taking anything away from talented and thoughtful exponents of the old days like Tom Shaffer.


— Jay Mathews
AP Courses Not for Everyone, Educator Says
Washington Post
2003-08-05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20023-2003Aug5.html

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