Debbie Luoma and I rarely disagree on matters educational. We
both homeschool. We both favor a rigorous, classical approach to
academics.
Debbie Luoma and I rarely disagree on matters educational. We both homeschool. We both favor a rigorous, classical approach to academics. We respect each other’s areas of expertise: I send my kids to Deb for English in the upper grades, and she sends hers to me for math, ditto.
But occasionally we disagree, and this time the divide is deep and wide. I think that GHS’s AP classes should remain open enrollment. Deb thinks that there is no way to teach a college level class if some or most of the students are ill-prepared.
Usually, I will placidly insist on my own opinion, but in this case I admit that Debbie speaks with the voice of long experience. Not only does she homeschool her children, she also teaches English part-time at Gavilan, and teaches her wildly successful rhetoric classes, which currently enroll about 60 mostly homeschooled students, who learn how to write logical, grammatical, cohesive, informative, and entertaining essays.
So, while I acknowledge Debbie’s expertise and the validity of her opinion, I still think that a student who wishes to challenge himself with a rigorous AP level class should be allowed to do so. The teacher should warn the prospective student, if his level of preparation seems inadequate, that he might find himself failing when the teacher sticks to a college level syllabus. But deny a motivated student the opportunity to sweat blood and push himself and succeed beyond his wildest dreams? Nay not.
Tuesday’s Dispatch reports that the parents from the Alliance for Academic Excellence and former science teacher Dale Morejon are planning to push the school district to close the enrollment to the AP classes, and also to end the requirement that all students enrolled in AP classes take the year-end AP exams.
One of the reasons Mr. Morejon gives for closing enrollment is the same as Debbie’s: that it’s difficult or impossible to teach high-level material to students of varying abilities. Let us examine candidly some of the unspoken reasons for closing enrollment and not requiring the exam, shall we?
Open enrollment and a required exam can make your numbers look very bad, as witness the AP Biology test results of 2002. Nationwide, 17.5 percent of AP biology examinees scored a 5; at GHS, no student scored that well. Nationwide, 22.9 percent scored 4 and another 24.2 percent scored 3. GHS’s percentages were 8.8 and 5.9. In short, 64.6 percent of examinees, nationwide, earned passing scores on this exam, compared to 14.7 percent at GHS.
So why would a student sign up for a class for which he was ill-prepared? Well, that AP designation looks really good on a transcript. And an AP class A is worth more to the GPA than an ordinary A; that’s why kids are graduating with GPAs of 4.2 these days. It’s more about grooming transcripts than about learning. I think a student who doesn’t take the exam should not get those extra grade points.
Consider an example of success: Jaime Escalante took a failing high school math program in an LA barrio and in a few years began churning out students who passed the rigorous AP Calculus exams. Mr. Escalante did not have prerequisites; he often encouraged students to take trig and calculus simultaneously, a notion that boggles my mathematical mind.
Mr. Escalante taught his students systematically, pushed them mercilessly, cajoled them relentlessly, and sent scores and hundreds of poor Latino kids off to college with college credits on their high school transcripts.
The GHS AP Spanish teacher, Mrs. Scettrini, and the economics and the U.S. Government and Politics teachers seem to be working similar miracles with open enrollment. Eighty-seven percent of Mrs. Scettrini’s students and 85 percent of the Econ examinees earned 3s or better. I would like to learn more of their methods.
I suppose that, being a bureaucracy, GHS can’t just let the individual teachers decide if they need prerequisites for their classes? That would be too sensible. But if a policy is made, and a prerequisite mandated, I hope that Mrs. Scettrini and the polisci and econ teachers will be allowed to continue with whatever it is that they are doing.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a homeschooling mother of three and a former engineer. She is a published independent author. Her column is published in The Dispatch every Friday and also appears online at www.gilroydispatch.com.