Why Not Commit to Win-Win School Improvement?
NPR Marketplace's Amy Scott, in "The Changing Role of Advanced Placement,"explains that the number of students in North Country High School, a working class school in the Baltimore suburbs, has more than tripled in the last five years. Scott reports that students who ordinarily would not be full members of a college-going culture now learn:
...concepts like 'polysyndeton' and 'metonomy.' In an assignment designed to help prepare them for the upcoming exam, students are asked to identify the rhetorical strategy in a passage from literature or popular music.
One result of expanding A.P. is that two thirds of the school's A.P. students don't pass the test and earn college credit. But, who cares if the pass rate drops? That is a political issue of interest only for adults. (Of course, I'm assuming that the world might not come to an end if some students don't completely master the word, "polysyndeton.")
Expanded A.P. helps students, who might otherwise be denied an opportunity to improve their writing and critical thinking skills, to learn challenging skills for mastery. Isn't that also supposed to be the purpose of Common Core -- providing college readiness learning opportunities?
Scott's story got me rethinking about the opportunities to invest in win-win education programs that have been squandered. What if school reform was limited (as much as possible) to policies that help as many students as possible? Rather than focus on incentives and disincentives, where some must lose so others could win, what if federal education policies concentrated on helping working class and poor children who have been left behind?
The expansion of A.P. to underserved populations could have even allowed market-driven reformers the chance to experiment in a kinder, gentler, junior version of incentives. It would make no sense to pay students for their "outputs" i.e. passing the test, but we could pay them a generous wage for attending A.P. tutoring sessions.
In contrast to the untried nature of Common Core, A.P. has a long history of success. It offers a test worth teaching to which is equally valuable as an assessment forteaching with. Students are rewarded for passing the tests but, above all, they are not punished for failing. Moreover, students could choose to take the number and the Why Not Commit to Win-Win School Improvement? | John Thompson:
