Repostted with permission of the American Federation of Teachers
http://www.aft.org
Where We Stand
By Albert Shanker
Home-Grown Standards
A few years ago, when I first started writing about the importance of common
educational standards, most Americans considered national or state standards
to be out of the question. Now, we have broad agreement in the U.S. that
standards are essential. Indeed, most of the 50 states are already on the way
to developing them.
The next question is, what to do while we're waiting? Even when states have
agreed on the level of writing students should reach and what they should
know about American history, for example, it will still be necessary to
devise curricula, train teachers to use them, and create assessments. And if
these things are done right, the process is bound to be a lengthy one.  What
happens to our current students and to those who come along in the meantime?
Are there any standards that can be put in place while the states build their
systems of standards and assessments? One option is to make more extensive
use of the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) program, which is our best
home-grown example of high standards in action.
AP was started 40 years ago, and it is based on the idea that students will
work hard to meet high standards if they are given the right kind of
incentive.  In this case, the incentive is college credit for advanced work
taken in high school. There are now 29 AP courses in 16 subjects, including
mathematics, history, music, chemistry, and computer science. Students who
take an AP course show they have achieved at a college level by getting a 3
or better (out of a possible 5) on an exam that is set by AP and graded by an
outside group of high school and college teachers. Not every college accepts
AP, but the list that does includes Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and nearly 3,000
others. AP credit demonstrates that a student is serious about learning and
willing to work hard. And given rising college fees, there is also a
financial incentive attached to AP credit.
AP exams are not as tough as those faced by French or German students seeking
entry to college, but they are not pushovers, either.  Most are three hours
long and include essay or problem-solving questions, as well as
multiple-choice. And even the multiple-choice questions require real content
knowledge. Take the following American History question:
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover disagreed most strongly
about the desirability of (A) a balanced federal budget; (B) farm price
supports; (C) federal aid to corporations; (D) a program of public works; (E)
federal relief to individuals.
A student would need more than the vague general knowledge that we associate
with many multiple-choice tests to pick out the correct answer to this
question.
The trouble with the current AP program is that it does not touch many
students. In 1995, only 8 percent of U.S. eighteen-year-olds took AP exams,
and only 5 percent scored a 3 or above. One reason for this is financial. It
costs schools money for the training AP teachers must have, and students must
pay to take the exams. However, some states--South Carolina, Indiana, and
Utah, for example--are now using a combination of mandates and incentives to
get more schools to offer AP courses and more students to take them.
In 1984, South Carolina, with the leadership of Governor Richard Riley, who
is now U.S. Secretary of Education, passed legislation requiring all schools
to offer AP classes or make them available through independent study or
distance learning. The state also encouraged greater use of AP courses and
exams by allocating money for teacher training and exam fees for needy
students. Finally, South Carolina strengthened the most important incentive
of all by getting state colleges and universities to accept AP courses for
college credit. The result has been a big increase both in the schools
offering AP classes and the students taking them. In 1983, only 3 percent of
students took an AP exam, but by 1995, the figure had risen to 11 percent,
and the number of schools offering AP courses increased from 37 percent in
1983 to 70 percent in 1995.
Every state ought to follow South Carolina's lead in making AP courses more
widely available and in removing financial roadblocks to offering and taking
them. If states do that, they might also discover that AP offers some useful
perspectives on their own standards-setting process. Once greater
participation in AP becomes a goal, states will find that more of their
students can meet tough AP standards than they thought possible. They will
also find that greater participation in AP shifts the whole agenda of their
schools towards higher academic achievement.  And they might be led to
rethink the link between exams and college entrance.  If nearly one-third of
youngsters in Germany and France and Japan take and pass four or five exams
that are at least as difficult as the APs, why shouldn't our students be able
to do the same?  They'll need to if we expect to measure up.
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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