If you had asked Nancy Grasmick five years ago how things were going with her big, splashy Advanced Placement campaign, she would have said: It's not pretty.
Maryland was expanding the elite program at a steady clip, pushing more and more high-schoolers into AP classes, with an aggressive marketing campaign that targeted rural and suburban kids as well as those in big, urban districts like Baltimore and Prince George's County.
AP TESTS: Failure rate climbing
But kids weren't doing so well.
While high schools were offering AP courses, Grasmick believes the day-to-day classwork didn't always demand much of students or match the rigor of the end-of-course tests.
"Teachers were saying they were teaching AP, but there was no fidelity in the curriculum," says Grasmick, Maryland's longtime, pugnacious state superintendent of schools. "Teachers were calling it AP — it wasn't AP. And then kids were taking the test and they weren't doing well — of course they weren't doing well."
Bucking the trend in South
Like virtually all of its neighboring Southern states, Maryland was coming up against reality: In its bid to rapidly expand AP, more kids were taking the classes — and more were failing, scoring a 1 or 2 on a five-point scale. Southern states, which include Maryland by U.S. Census Bureau definitions, now lead the nation in AP failure rates, with nearly half of all tests scoring a 1 or 2, according to a USA TODAY analysis. Nationwide, 41.5% of AP tests taken last year earned a failing score. In the South, it was 48.4%.