All through the school year, I attended the Gilroy High School AP/Honors parent meetings. At the last of these meetings, the Advanced Placement teachers spoke to parents of incoming eighth grade students who were interested in taking Honors classes and parents of students who will enroll in AP courses this fall.
At these meetings, parents always inquire about the success of the AP program. Parents were led to believe that while some programs were more successful than others, the majority of students enrolled were doing about as well as students nationwide.
Now that the school year is over, the AP exam results from 2003-2004 are finally being released. In some courses, the picture is not quite as rosy as parents were told. Additionally, some of the Gilroy High AP teachers do not give themselves enough credit.
The AP exam results for Government/Economics, Environmental Science, Spanish Language and Spanish Literature at Gilroy High met or exceeded national averages. Kudos to these teachers who are obviously doing something right.
In other areas, our students are not doing nearly as well. In English Language and English Literature, just over one third of our students are passing the AP exam, while almost two thirds of students nationally pass these AP exams.
For the English department, I would tend to believe that the problem is not the teaching as much as the large number of students taking these classes. In 2003-2004, nearly 200 students were enrolled in AP Junior or AP Senior English.
Clearly, not all of these students were capable of being successful in a college level course. (This is not to say that these students are not bright or capable of being successful in college, they were simply not ready for a rigorous college course at 16 or 17 years of age. Since they have all graduated high school, I bet that most of them are able to do college level work now.)
Math and biology are the real low points when it comes to AP courses at Gilroy High. AP Biology doesn’t draw many students (15 enrolled for each of the past two years) and these kids have not been successful on the AP exam.
The science department at Gilroy High is outstanding, and the number of courses offered exceeds that of every high school in Santa Clara County. AP Biology may suffer because some of the best science minds are busy taking physics, anatomy, sports medicine or environmental science.
Two AP Math classes are offered at Gilroy High. AP Statistics attracts more students than AP Calculus. Of the 44 students who took AP Statistics, nine kids passed the exam while 35 didn’t. Only 20% of the class could pass the AP exam, which is an especially sobering number when you consider that 62 percent of students nationwide who took the exact same class managed to pass.
For AP Calculus, it isn’t quite as grim at Gilroy High, but only 41% of the 21 students who were enrolled were able to pass the exam compared to 66 percent nationwide.
The most troubling aspect to these dismal results is the fact that the teacher who teaches these classes has not been forthright when parents specifically asked how well our students do in these classes. (The words “near the national average” were mentioned at one of the meetings).
Those 65 juniors and seniors who rise to the challenge of taking an AP Math course represent the cream of the crop at Gilroy High. There are not hundreds of students capable or interested in taking advanced Mathematics.
I believe that our students need to make informed decisions when signing up for rigorous classes. I believe parents and students are entitled to know up front that 80 percent of the students enrolled in AP Statistics did not pass the AP exam the previous year.
Perhaps some of these students would opt to take statistics somewhere else. Or maybe, and I am just speculating here, the principal of Gilroy High or the chair of the math department might decide that a teacher who can’t get even a third of his students to successfully pass the AP exam might not be the most qualified teacher of AP Statistics.
In the not too distant past, Gilroy High has fired and chosen to not re-hire teachers who were highly qualified, while the community was left asking for the definition of “not a good fit.”
I am wondering how an AP Statistics teacher who is clearly not successful with our brightest students continues to be considered a good fit year after year.
