Advanced Placement Classes May Have Been A Fine Idea, But A New Book Explains How They Have Lost Their Way
Over at Forbes, I take a look at a new book by Annie Abrams that explains so much about the misbegotten state of AP courses.
The College Board’s Advanced Placement courses have become omnipresent in American high schools, supposedly representing a leg up for the college bound, the AP tests a chance for the best and brightest to shine. Yet even as the courses become more firmly ensconced, some question their value and role in U.S. education. Is it a course that provides a real high-level education, or simply an opportunity to pursue a credential?
Annie Abrams’s new book, Shortchanged, puts the story of Advanced Placement courses in perspective, but in the end, perspective does not improve the view of the College Board’s product. It’s an important read for anyone contemplating the time honored courses, either from a teacher or student perspective. And it is a reminder that while the name “College Board” sounds like some sort of quasi-governmental entity overseeing higher education, they are simply a private company with products to market.
Abrams breaks the book into halves; the first section deals with the origin story of the courses. That story is a complicated mix of contrasting impulses, containing, Abrams says, “ego, elitism, imperfection, zeal, and hope.”
The founding fathers (they were all white males) embraced a Jeffersonian view “that hierarchy was not only necessary but vital to the American way of life,” but that hierarchy could not be based on inherited wealth or station. Education, in this view, is a way for persons born into the lower classes to establish that they were deserving of rising to the levels of the elite, that there is an “invisible underlying hierarchy of intelligence that a meritocratic educational system could reveal.” So why not create a series of courses that aids in that process?
The type of education that the founders had in mind was not a “practical” or vocationally-aimed education, but a classic liberal, humanities-centric education. The Blackmer committee, when laying the groundwork for AP courses in the fifties, wrote, “Individual persons are an end in themselves. Liberal education and the democratic ideal are related to each other in a thousand ways” and for that individual, education should “develop their mental abilities to the very utmost.” They extolled robust, flexible, thoughtful, wise, rich, and deeply humanistic intellectual development far beyond what could be measured by a simple test.