Teacher Training and AP Support Vital to Minority Success
June 7, 2013
A new report titled “The Road to Equity: Expanding AP Access and Success for African-American Students,” has been released by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which hopes to raise awareness of the incredibly wide achievement gap in American education by exploring the programs that are helping to close that gap in six urban school districts.
“One of the greatest challenges in American public schools today is the inability of many high school graduates to do college-level work,” the report states. “Academic rigor, therefore, is a concept that has come to dominate conversations about school reform, with districts working to expand the number of students exposed to challenging coursework.”
The challenging coursework the report is referring to, of course, is the Advanced Placement (AP) Program, which enables students to earn both high school and college credit if they earn a qualifying score. According to the report, when the program was first conceived over 50 years ago, only the best and brightest students were allowed to partake in such classes. However, much has changed since the program’s inception. “Enrollment has nearly tripled since the turn of the 21st century, with 2 million students taking 4 million exams in 2012 and many more students of color and low income students participating.”
It’s not just minority enrollment that is increasing either. In some districts, African-American students “were improving passing rates quickly enough to gain on their white peers while increasing or keeping participation levels steady.” In other words, they were closing the achievement gap between that has plagued American education for decades. This was made possible, though, by the realization that, instead of simply telling students what to do, the teachers must actively engage with their students on a deeper level, and that districts need to implement training and programs to accelerate that change.
One school district that recognized this fact aligned itself with AdvanceKentucky Program, an affiliate of The National Math and Science Initiative. According to the report, the district started seeing a significant increase in AP participation, and the program is now available in all of its schools, thanks to improved counseling processes and NMSI’s financial reward incentives.
However, these changes shouldn’t stop at secondary education. To instill true change in the public education system, the authors of this report believe districts have to start implementing these practices at the elementary level.
For example, at Dunwoody Springs Elementary School, where the majority of students are of low-income or minority status, the teachers there are helping their students develop higher-order thinking levels by steering them “towards books slightly above their grade level on topics that interest them and prodded to consider more complex questions.”
“If we ask the low-level questions,” says Principal Ivy Freeman, “if we only expect minimal standards, then that’s what we get.”
Therefore, in order to increase AP participation and passing score rates – especially among minorities – educators have to go back to the basics and encourage their students to be more than just average, and that happens through critical, effective teacher training.
For more information about the results of the report and the districts involved, you can read the full report here.