Opting Out

Even as AP enrollment burgeons, some schools are deciding to drop the program altogether.

By Bruce G. Hammond

Recent news coverage of the College Board’s advanced placement program has probably caused some head-scratching. While articles in Education Week and Teacher Magazine [ “Mass Appeal,” March/April] have highlighted the program’s explosive growth, a headline in the Wall Street Journal declared, “Elite High Schools Drop AP Courses.” The story that followed described a small but growing number of independent schools, including the one where I am the director of college counseling, that choose not to participate in AP or any other standardized curriculum.

To most people, schools that opt out of the advanced placement program probably seem like educational spoilsports. Do we think we’re too good for AP? Are we afraid that our students won’t score high enough on the exams to justify our schools’ exalted reputations? The AP program has its critics, but most people agree that the courses represent a reasonable facsimile of introductory college-level work. Why should independent schools be cutting the AP curriculum just as it is becoming all but universal in the public sector?

I can’t speak for all the schools that have dropped or are thinking about dropping advanced placement, but as the convener of a group of counselors at non-AP schools (and a former AP teacher), I have heard the views of many. The case against AP consists mainly of what good teachers know in their bones: Students learn best when they can immerse themselves in hands-on work, and the best learning involves genuine discovery rather than ferreting out information hidden away in the teacher’s brain. Modern research tells us that the human mind does not absorb knowledge so much as construct it. Students who initiate and control their learning process retain far more than those...