Annie Abrams on How Advanced Placement 'Shortchanges' Students

In which Dan talks with Annie Abrams, public school teacher and author of the new book Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Dan was always skeptical of the AP for reasons related to cost and its content-heavy nature, but after reading Abrams' rich analysis and critique of the program, it's clear that there's a lot more to it than that. Dan and Annie discuss why the AP has such reach in America's high schools, how teacher autonomy and student agency are damaged by AP courses, and possible solutions.

As always, I welcome comments and questions on Twitter and Instagram @BigIdeaEd

Mentioned in the show:
Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students by Annie Abrams
Culver City eliminates honors English in attempt to reach racial equity by KQED
Time to Slay the College Board Dragon by Michael Hynes

conference to restore humanity! 2023 from Human Restoration Project
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Music by Barry Moore

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

A top-down approach to liberal education is antithetical to the philosophy of education. So autonomous teachers, students who have a lot of time and space to get lost in complicated problems, as opposed to say writing very quick timed assignments, right? Like that kind of thing. It's a labor issue and it's a time issue for students.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

I'm your host, Dan Carney. May has arrived, and for many high school students across the country, that means it's time for their advanced placement exams. Even if you never took AP yourself, you're no doubt aware of its presence in our educational landscape. In 2022, over one million students registered for at least one exam, often with hopes of attaining scores that will earn them university credit. English literature and composition, U.S. history and calculus are among the most popular classes taken. The AP's parent company is the College Board, which also administers the SAT, making the College Board one hell of a powerful player in American education. Full disclosure, I have never been a fan of the AP. As a history teacher and one who values inquiry, exploration, and a student-centered pace of learning, I find the AP US history, world history, European history curricula nauseatingly stuffed full of content, the exam tasks rigid and uninspiring. And while I genuinely appreciate the opportunity for college credit that the AP exams afford, the cost-benefit analysis of this opportunity raises more than a few eyebrows. As Michael Hines, a superintendent in New York, wrote back in 2017, quote, over the years the College Board has literally convinced school administrators, school board trustees, teachers, parents, and students that they can't live without what they sell. They sell classes and tests to schools like Big Pharma sells pills to consumers. All of this to say nothing of the test prep cottage industry that has sprung up around advanced placement in the form of tutoring companies, books, apps, and other ways for many people, aside from students and their families, to cash in. Still, I suppose my criticism of advanced placement was a bit superficial and obvious. Too much content, too high a price. Well, until recently, when I read Annie Abrams' new book, Shortchanged, How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Annie's a public school teacher in New York who holds a doctorate from NYU, and her new book traces the history of the advanced placement, from its elite origins to its more expansive and accessible present. Annie's critique of the program includes some powerful and persuasive discussion of teacher autonomy, student writing, and the reach of an organization that, in many districts around the country, has become a de facto national curriculum. Here in Southern California, a school district recently announced that it was dropping the honors label for all high school courses. From now on, all high school students will take the same classes. And the rationale behind this is an admirable one. Students of color are vastly underrepresented in the grade 11 and 12 advanced placement courses. And the hope here is that all students would be able to achieve access and success in those AP courses if students were not tracked into honors classes. And it's been discussed a lot here in the Los Angeles area on the radio and in print. But what I found so striking was that nowhere in the discussion was it questioned that advanced placement was the obvious end goal. It was a baked-in assumption that all high school students should be striving for AP courses. And so I started my interview with Andy Abrams by asking her about this. Why, in so many places in America, is the obvious, unquestioned goal of high school to take advanced placement courses?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

There are a bunch of reasons, um, intertwined reasons why AP has become a default. Uh, first of all, the strength of the brand name, right? People don't really question it as an institution. It's it's just kind of always been around, it seems, right? Um, that's one thing. Another, uh the college boards worked with lawmakers um to incentivize the implementation of advanced placement. I don't know specifically about what's going on in terms of law in LA. Um, but I would imagine that that has something to do with it. Um, in different districts, there are sometimes financial incentives for administrators, for teachers, for students to enroll in AP. And then there's always the consideration of college tuition and college admissions when people are talking about the advantages of AP.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Could you just give a snapshot for my listeners? When we say an advanced placement course and the corresponding exams, generally what are we talking about?

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Um, so the definition of AP has shifted over the years, right? It's not a constant thing. What's constant is the idea of college credit in high school, right? But the shape that that takes has changed. So, especially over the past decade and then over the past five or six years, um what we're talking about is an increasingly prescriptive curriculum. Um, and then an exam that reflects that curriculum. So the college board now markets it as a corrective, right? Like instead of saying the test could be on anything, there's a very focused uh exam. Sorry, can you hear my toddler? She's freaking out. Um yeah, so there's now a very focused exam. Um in the past it's been more open-ended. I don't think that it'll return there. I my sense is that it's getting increasingly constrictive. And that's sorry, and that's across most subjects, right? So, like if you're talking about physics, if you're talking about biology, if you're talking about government, we're talking about like increasingly prescriptive curricula across disciplines. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Who is the college board?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Who is the college board?

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Um What is the College Board? The c the College Board sort of looms in the background of so much of education. What what is what is the college board?

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Um so it depends on who you ask. So the College Board's definition is a membership organization and a nonprofit that I think I I should pull up their website, but it's something like clears the way to college and career success, right? Or opportunity. The head of the college board has now for a decade been David Coleman. Um, he was also the chief architect behind the common core. Who is the college board is a is a thorny question. There are a lot of people who are the college board. And then you can get into the affiliated teachers and scholars and graders and readers, right? The organization, it's small at the top, I think, but then massive. Right? Are are we all the college board? I don't I don't know, right? But like the reach of the organization is pretty vast.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

And I think are we all the college board is a good way of putting it. And we'll get into sort of the systemization of education that you discuss in your book. We can start there with maybe a a theme that comes up a lot in your book, and that is teacher autonomy. And maybe we take a step back, and I'd be curious your thoughts about um, you know, you are a teacher, uh, and uh the creativity inherent in being a teacher. But in your experience, what role does creativity and autonomy play for teachers? And how does the AP encroach on that?

SPEAKER_00 9:18

In a free society, right, individuals have rights and responsibilities. And it seems to me that some of those rights and responsibilities for teachers should be a lot more discretion over curriculum. And with that discretion, of course, would we would need more support, right, more opportunities to collaborate. I'm not saying that teachers should go it alone, that the classroom should be this black box where like they just lord over students who are there every day. Um But I think that autonomy is an important part of living in a free society.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

The low-hanging fruit of culture war that we engage in in this country that it's easy to sort of say, well, Florida doesn't want the African American Studies program, AP you know, and Florida are fighting it out over this and AP is caving. But I found in your book there's just a much deeper uh issue um with how the AP is influencing education and and um there's for example one quote that really stood out to me. You said that the um the AP has an anti-intellectual approach that quote expecting teachers to prioritize a corporation's authority, its reductive curriculum, and mediated relationships with students. How does the AP expect teachers to prioritize its authority?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

So the course and exam description, what I mentioned earlier about it being increasingly prescriptive, um, there are now distinct units for each course. Within those units, there are daily suggestions, right? And on AP classroom for students, there are videos, there are assignments. Um and all of this is potentially in tension with how a teacher thinks time might be best spent. So if a teacher doesn't agree with the sequence that the college board prescribes, there's tension there.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

You have a chapter dedicated to this platform AP Classroom, which sounds pretty 21st century, sort of a portal that gives students uh the ability to manage their AP learning. But what is it about this uh AP classroom that you take issue with?

SPEAKER_00 11:59

AP classroom sort of reframes relationships between and among teachers and students. Um it redirects like the purpose of a course. So, like I was saying, if a student is very exam focused, right, they can just go on to AP classroom. And if the teacher unlocks all of the assignments, all of the videos, um, then a student can just sort of march through whatever is on AP classroom in service of the exam. And then it seems like everyone misses out on a sort of richer experience. Um the other thing about AP classroom is the extent of the standardization is troublesome to me, especially because AP is college. Right. So to my mind, when you have wealthier institutions offering seminars in person that are lively and collaborative and rooted in difficult questions and interaction, and then you offer AP classroom as this alternative cheaper way to path to college credit. Um it seems like bringing those two things. It seems like bringing up the difference between those two things matters if we're gonna talk about equity, right? Who gets this richer experience and who is marching through AP classroom?

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Is it is it about a richer experience? I'm just feeling like a really strong tension between this idea of a richer experience and college credit. I guess first of all, is college credit is that still a big thing for the AP? Are colleges still giving credit? And how is that, what's the interaction between the quest for those college credits and what you describe as a richer experience?

SPEAKER_00 14:01

The way that AP is set up right now, a lot of private universities are dropping the program. So Harvard doesn't grant credit for graduation. Um but it's enshrined in law or in policy across most uh states that AP scores of three, four, or five must be rewarded with credit at public institutions. Um so to my mind, turning public high school and college into this sort of drier version of accumulating credits is a big problem when private universities are turning towards this other model that is, I would argue, richer in several senses.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Why did the private universities, the Harvards, the Vassars, why have they turned away from the AP? The AP has expanded greatly.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

It's expanded greatly. Um and you can make a lot of different arguments, right? I don't, I don't know, right? I'm not on the boards of these schools. I think that a lot of people are skeptical of private institutions with good reason, right? A lot of people would argue that it's just about the bottom line, right? AP saves money and they don't need to do that. Um The other thing is that these independent schools that have, I would argue that it's important to look at their philosophies of education. Is there tension between like what they think their project is and what the project of AP is? Um, and you know, so you can get at it from a number of different angles. But I think it's important to consider to not just look at Harvard and say like this gazillion-dollar institution and just be cynical about it, right? Like maybe they're on to something.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

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SPEAKER_00 18:05

Um, so part of the story of advanced placement, I think a lot of people think of the origins of advanced placement um in terms of consolidating privilege for these wealthy white male students. Um and that's right. And then there's another part of the story, which is that a lot of their teachers were really devoted to the notion of liberal education, which is education for self-governance. Um, and when I talk about a college seminar, that's really what I'm talking about, right? Like students who feel empowered to weigh in on thorny, complicated issues and who think that their voices in a public setting matter. Um, so who has access to that kind of thing is an interesting question to me. And I think that that's the that's really the thing about AP classroom is that it's not liberal education anymore. That's not what we're talking about. AP classroom represents a total shift from liberal education as a model.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

The AP would argue otherwise, and they're touting their you know, their um shaping of American citizens, you know, through the government and US history courses. And even I think was it the Fordham Institute that has praised it for being uh a model of liberal education? So why do you argue that it's not?

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Um so my understanding of liberal education is such that standardization has nothing to do with it, right? Like a top-down approach to liberal education is antithetical to the philosophy of education. So autonomous teachers, um students who have a lot of time and space to get lost in complicated problems, um, as opposed to say writing very quick timed assignments, right? Like that kind of thing. It it it's a labor issue and it's a time issue for students.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Let's talk about writing though, because you have a lot to say about what advanced placement has done to student writing. Um you say at one point that AP essays measure a basic ability to conform and regurgitate. Um what uh what has advanced placement done to student writing? And and and as a as a writing teacher, how how is it what what happened to you in the classroom? What experience did you have? Because you share this in the book as well, how either your relationship with your students changed because of teaching writing through the advanced placement course.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

So in the book, I mostly talk about writing in English courses. The rubrics in history courses.

unknown 21:02

I think okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

I think it's wild that the conversation about Chat GPT, where everyone was like, oh, but it couldn't pass English, right? I think it's wild that it's okay to people that it passed history, right? Writing is a part of history. History's made of narratives, right? What are we talking about? So the rubrics for history courses are in some ways um worse is the wrong word, but in some ways like more prescriptive even than the ones in English. For more like more formula formulaic is the right word, right? Or more formulaic than the ones in English. Um but when the concern is college credit or earning a certain score for admissions, when the exam score is the focus, then other senses of purpose fall by the wayside. And so, in terms of writing, um If you're trying to game the exam, then that requires a different set of skills than developing a really complicated idea, I would argue. I think that for me as a writer, right, the process is kind of messy. Um, there are steps, right? Like there's drafting, there's brainstorming, there's revising, there's polishing, peer editing is part of it, right? There are steps you can go through. Um, but to start from start to finish, it takes longer than the 40 minutes that you have for an APSA. Um, and so it's an imperfect system, right? Of course, but I think that that timed narrow kind of assignment gives students the wrong impression about what it is to write a college-level essay. Right. If you're writing using a formula to a prompt that's disconnected from anything you've read all year, that's a very different experience from producing a seminar paper that comes out of a longer conversation.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yeah, I the the timed segment really bothers me. I I I used to t teach IB, the International Baccalaureate, and the history component of that always drove me nuts. Like, you know, there's not a historian on earth that sits down for you know a 55-minute chunk of time and tries to analyze a primary source and write about it, and then that's it. The clock strikes 55 minutes. It's not replicating anything that a real practitioner would do.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

And then you just forget about it, right? And then it's just it.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

And then you're you're yeah, that's you never think about that again. You just get the get the credit and move on. Um you you quote uh, I think it's Vassar College in the other English department, saying that you know, writing is a conversation, that it's and and and what you've just described from the advanced placement seems to be quite the opposite of that.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Right. So I should say, like, I I went to Vassar, so heavily informed uh by their philosophy. I think that there are a lot of different ways to think about the point of learning to write an essay, right? Like what an essay is supposed to do, how it's supposed to serve a student. Um, I think that helping a student know their own mind is a really valuable thing, right? Like writing through something in a low-stakes way, or writing to a friend, or right, there are just so many different ways to have serious ideas. Um and the time spent drilling to the exam, it's a missed opportunity, I think. Right. So, like you could do the sort of serious revision on a research paper that I was talking about earlier. You could also have students write to each other or write to themselves, right? Like, and so if you're spending time on five paragraph essays, you don't have time for those other things.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Yeah, I I um a couple of years ago I interviewed John Warner, who has written a lot about writing writing and student agency and writing, and he told a story about when he took the AP literature exam, he sat down and he was just bored. And in the moment he invented a novel and and wrote, you know, he because he knew the formula, as you say, he knew what had to be put in there. He invented a novel and he wrote the essay and he got a five. Um, which I suppose in uh today's internet society may be harder to pull off, but the point being that it is all about the formula, it's all about the steps. And you know, there's a whole raft. I was just looking on a few days ago, I'm looking th through like uh Apple Podcasts, and there are so many podcasts that are AP prep. And you l you listen to them, and then literally it's like, okay, so here's a suggestion on some phrases you could use, some themes you could mention, and how you could incorporate that into the different parts of an essay. It's so depressing. It's it's like the exact opposite of what you would what what we might describe as learning in the classroom.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Well, yeah, I mean it's a it's a form of learning, I guess, but it um I would argue that the effect is not that students learn to trust their own thought processes.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

It's so disconnected. It's like what you mentioned with like the you know, the you take the test and you immediately forget it. And that's what it feels like. It feels like the there's no internalization component. It's strictly I'm gonna hold on to this as long as I need to, um, and then I'm gonna let it go.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

It's really cynical.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Any sense in your research on how students and their families feel about the AP? You you quote some students in your book at one point, I think, from uh in the comments section of a New York Times uh article, which of course is no way of verifying these are actually students, but basically students saying that um something to the effect of passing a test over being intellectually engaged and one parent calling it a racket. How much did you in your in your research did you sort of interact with the student experience and the parent experience, and and how did that inform your view of advanced placement?

SPEAKER_00 27:39

So there's a wide range of views. Um there are some students who I you know, I mean, there are students who are really grateful that the program exists because at least it's something, right? Um it's what we have. So there are students and parents who think, well, at least I can make myself stand out this way. Um and there are students and parents very concerned with the exam and who say and who have you know good reason to be a little mistrustful of teachers, right? They're they're worried about teachers' individual judgments. Um, they would rather have this kind of objective or nominally objective program setting standards. Um, that's real, right? I wouldn't deny that. And then on the other hand, you have teachers, not teachers, and then on the other hand, you have students and parents who say, I want a different kind of experience. Um and I've had in my own classroom, I've had the full range in one classroom, right? And so like trying to teach to all of those different concerns is a is a challenge. Some parents and students are very concerned about exams and others aren't. It's it's a mixed bag.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

And you do make the point, which I think is a really valid one, that AP can help some people see themselves in a different way, see themselves as scholars, and right? It's it that and especially maybe in some schools where that's not the ethos, AP can can do that. But the interesting word to use there, judgment. Right? Individual teacher judgment can be questioned. But at the top of this system, it is still a judgment um on the part of the college board and advanced placement. And ultimately, who when these uh frameworks, as they call them, are put together, who ultimately is making the judgment? Maybe we could just take like the literature framework, for example. Are we talking college professors, teachers? Who actually whose judgment are we actually talking about when we say this course is going to be rolled out?

SPEAKER_00 30:12

What what the college board says um on their website is that the academic merit of the courses rests on committees of six, so three professors, three teachers. Um other people review the courses, and then internally to the college board, how it works with psychometricians, right? Like people who determine the validity of exams, and then also how it works with the ed tech that the company is investing in, right? Like I'm not totally sure. I would I hope that the book leads to greater transparency about the process. I would like to know a lot more. The other question is what we've learned from the episode with the Florida Department of Education, right? Maybe it's also not just internal to the college board who's making these decisions, right? I want to know more about that too. Um, and part of the problem to me is that we have this nominally objective organization, but that's not real, right? Like we just have a bunch of subjective judgments. Um, and I want to know more about whose judgments they are.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Corporations and and institutions have a way of definitely presenting themselves as objective, uh, particularly with with the materials and and the officiousness of them, etc. Um as we kind of come to an end here, maybe this is a good chance to kind of step back about and big picture with your book, uh, which has just come out. What ultimately, what motivated you to write the book and what uh do you hope um comes next? What do you what do you hope the book will um what do you what do you hope readers will take away from the book and and what might the book what changes might the book bring about?

SPEAKER_00 32:14

I wrote the book because I thought that the what I was seeing in the classroom um didn't align with my sense for what high school or college are for. Um I think that we could do better by students in both cases. Um another reason I wrote the book is that it seemed to me that teachers, parents, students, a lot of people were nervous about saying that they didn't like aspects of the program. And I think that that should be a public conversation. I don't see any reason to whisper about that, right? Why can't we say it out loud? Um so that's part of it. And I think also there are values at the root of AP that kind of get obscured, right? That the idea that this program represents a series of choices that people have made and continue to make, I wanted to defamiliarize that a little and say, like, what are these choices really? Are there better ones we could be making? Um and so, in terms of what I hope the book does, I hope it sparks some conversations. I would hate for it to be the last word on anything. I hope it's not that. Um it's nice to meet you, right? I hope there's more of this. I hope there's just more people talking about what it is we're doing and whether or not it's what we want to be doing together.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

Yeah, I mean, I found the book to be really compelling, very readable, lots of great anecdotes and uh and and research. Um could really feel the the uh the labor of the book. Uh awesome. If if um you know, if if if I gave you the magic wand and you could wave it and make one change.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

I would like for people to have more space to think and to share their thoughts. So when I say people, I mean students primarily, and then I mean teachers, and I also mean professors, right? Just more space to think.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Amen to that. I concur 100%. Um Annie, thanks so much for taking the time to join me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

A huge thanks to Annie Abrams for joining me on the podcast. I hope this episode has given you something to think about in terms of how our high schools operate, uh how our education system has given a lot over to the advanced placement, and how, frankly, the AP has become very entrenched in the way we do high school. Uh a lot of frankly, egos have been sunk into this, a lot of money's been sunk into this, a lot of prestige has been sunk into this. A lot of we are an AP high school, I am an AP teacher. I am an AP student. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes it helps students see themselves in a different way, but I think Annie's book, which I strongly recommend, link in the show notes, and this interview will help you think about what the cost is to the autonomy of teachers, to the process of learning, student writing, student thinking, and the value of having a company have this much control and influence in American education. As always, welcome comments and questions on Twitter and Instagram at Big IdeaEd. Thanks for listening, everyone. Stay well and finish the year strong.