I was expecting to write this piece as an impassioned argument against AP courses. There has been consistent criticism of them from many a student enrolled in them and if you’re not in an AP, then you’ve still probably heard at least some of the reasons why they’re not the most loved course option. As I sought out teachers of AP courses and teachers with previous experience teaching them (but who now don’t) my perspective grew more nuanced, and I have since aimed to focus this piece not on arguing for a uniform end to APs, but instead on investigating how best to uphold learning that promotes critical thinking and challenges that don’t alienate anyone who isn’t on the mainline “industrial” level of prescribed skills one “ought to have”. Issues that have popped up have been problems with the “industrial model of education” that is the broad status quo, ‘prestige culture’, and the way curriculums are designed.
This notion of the “industrial model of education” was first introduced to me in my interview with Elisabeth Merrill, a member of the science faculty who currently teaches AP Biology and several seminars focused on specific aspects of biology. Merrill called out how education is a field uniquely (and wrongly) ‘industrialized’. “So you’re supposed to read by the time you’re in first grade. A lot of kids can’t…So you start from first grade…telling kids basically that you’re dumb,” Merrill began, then continued, “the weird thing is, we don’t expect people to do it in any other field. We don’t expect everybody to be the star ballerina, quarterback, violin, there is no other place..except in education…and it’s just not the way the brain works. We set kids up for feeling like failures from a pretty young age because of an industrial model.”
What I also gleaned from my interview with Elisabeth Merrill was the nuances of the nature of APs which I hadn’t fully thought through initially. Merrill did repeat a lot of the criticisms I had heard before and which influenced my initial view heavily – the AP curriculum (especially in content-based courses like the sciences and history) is quite rigid, that certain aspects of how skills are assessed don’t center around critical thinking, and that it can reinforce a bad mindset of a perceived hierarchy from being in a given AP versus not.
What I didn’t expect was the positive case for APs that Merrill made, even still. She noted, for one, that it kept a set agreed-to standard for curricula, identifying that as an advantage because it warded off potential for, not only a student, but also a teacher’s “laziness”. She also noted that, in her opinion, AP courses could actually be a force of, if not greater equality, at least keeping things from becoming more socioeconomically unfair. I have always been a fan of “Advanced Topics” courses rather than APs, and Merrill got me to question this for the first time with her raising of how certain (especially wealthier) students can take an AT class and still sit the AP exam to get credit where their less wealthy peers cannot from that same AT, sans AP exam. “If you can afford to pay for a tutor, you can actually challenge the AP exam, versus you can’t afford that extra support…So there’s an inequity in that I think that would happen here,” Merrill said.
There is so much more, practically a dissertation, I feel like I want to write about all of this, but my key takeaway here is that I was intrigued and effected a lot from – go figure – hearing perspectives from the other side of the issue that I had not give much previous consideration. This issue is quite nuanced, and this piece has divided my emotional and rational minds’ sentiments on matters of to AP or not to AP. I hope that we can have a lot more conversation on this broader issue.
