Enrollment in AP classes has soared in recent years. AP classes failing students

Taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to nudge more students into Advanced Placement classes — but a close look at test scores suggests much of the investment has been wasted.

Expanding participation in AP classes has been a bipartisan goal, promoted by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and by Republican governors including Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and John Kasich of Ohio. In the last five years, the federal government has spent $275 million to promote the classes and subsidize exam fees for low-income students; states have spent many millions more.


Enrollment in AP classes has soared. But data analyzed by POLITICO shows that the number of kids who bomb the AP exams is growing even more rapidly. The class of 2012, for instance, failed nearly 1.3 million AP exams during their high school careers. That’s a lot of time and money down the drain; research shows that students don’t reap any measurable benefit from AP classes unless they do well enough to pass the $89 end-of-course exam.

In its annual reports, the nonprofit College Board, which runs the Advanced Placement program, emphasizes the positive: The percentage of students who pass at least one AP exam during high school has been rising steadily. Because so many students now take more than one AP class, however, the overall pass rate dropped from 61 percent for the class of 2002 to 57 percent for the class of 2012.

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Even more striking: The share of exams that earned the lowest possible score jumped from 14 percent to 22 percent, according to College Board data.

The trend challenges a widespread philosophy that students exposed to higher standards will find a way to meet them. Graded in part by college professors, AP exams provide a fairly objective measure of performance — and the results suggest that when the bar is raised too high, a good number of students trip.

“Well-meaning policy makers encourage Advanced Placement in order to set high expectations,” said Kristin Klopfenstein, an education professor who has studied AP trends and now runs the Education Innovation Institute at the University of Northern Colorado. “But their eagerness for expansion has gotten ahead of the support systems in place for these kids.”

At least a dozen states now give schools incentives to offer AP classes and fill them up with students. One popular tactic: Awarding bonus points for high AP participation in the formulas that determine a school’s state rating. Some states give schools extra funds for textbooks or teacher training if they offer AP. Additional incentives come from popular media rankings of “best high schools,” which often give heavy weight to the percentage of students enrolled in AP classes.

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State and federal policy-makers have put special emphasis on enrolling more minority and low-income students, spending heavily to subsidize the exam fees for students who meet income guidelines. But many of those students lack the academic background they need to excel in a college-level course, Klopfenstein said. African-American students in the class of 2012 passed just 27 percent of the AP exams they took; Hispanic students passed 41 percent.

Advanced Placement classes, available in 34 subjects from art history to calculus, are supposed to be taught at a college level. The exams are graded on a scale of 1 to 5. The College Board considers 3 a passing grade, though fully a third of the universities that grant college credit for AP require a score of 4 or 5. Dartmouth College, questioning the program’s rigor, has announced it will soon stop accepting any AP scores for credit.

Advocates often argue that students benefit from being exposed to the high expectations of an AP class, even if they don’t pass the test.

Yet there’s no proof that’s true.

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In fact, taking an AP class does not lead to better grades in college, higher college graduation rates, or any other tangible benefit — unless the student does well enough to pass the AP test, said Trevor Packer, a senior vice president at the College Board.

In the past, the College Board has pointed to studies that found a correlation between taking an AP class, whatever the outcome, and succeeding in college. Yet that research was flawed because it didn’t control for other predictors of college success, such as family income or high-school grades, Packer said. More rigorous studies find benefits only for students who earn at least a 3 on the AP test.

That means, Packer said, that hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in AP may be better served by lower-level classes that focus on building foundational skills. “We have no interest in collecting exam fees ,” he said, “if the kids are not going to benefit.”

Those exam fees, however, continue to roll in. The nonprofit College Board, which also runs the SAT, reported net assets of $609 million at the end of fiscal year 2012, up from $491 million two years earlier.

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For decades, the AP division had been a drain on the organization, losing money because the tests are so pricey to grade. But surging volume has changed that; revenues from AP tests now exceed expenses by $20 million to $30 million a year, Packer said. The College Board spends the excess on teacher training, scholarships and test redesigns, he said.

The College Board recommends that schools screen students for AP aptitude by their scores on standardized tests such as the PSAT (which is also administered by the Board).

At some schools, however, it’s become an article of faith that every student can succeed in AP if they’re pushed.

Tom Torkelson, the co-founder and CEO of the IDEA network of charter schools in Texas, says it’s insulting to question whether his students — who are mostly low-income and often speak Spanish at home — can handle AP. Elite private schools expect their students to succeed at that level, he said, and so does he. “We’re trying to create that same culture and expectation in our schools,” he said.

So nearly every IDEA student takes multiple AP classes during both their junior and senior years. That policy has boosted IDEA’s stature as a top-achieving charter network: It recently won $40 million in federal grant money and three of its high schools earned gold medals on U.S. News & World Report’s “Best High Schools” list this spring.

But some teachers at IDEA say they quickly realize they must water down classes that are nominally Advanced Placement to meet students’ needs.

Odell Brown, who taught juniors AP English last school year at IDEA Frontier High School in Brownsville, Tex., said he had to “scaffold” each assignment: He would write a model essay and urge his weaker students to copy it, sentence by sentence, swapping out his phrases for their own wherever possible. In another AP English class, for seniors, the end-of-year vocabulary review featured words more often seen on sixth-grade lists, such as “optimistic,” “irate” and “benevolent.”

Adrian Hernandez, who taught AP U.S. History, said he feared the AP label lulled students to think they were ready for college work, when in truth, so many were so far from that level that his lessons rarely even began to approach true AP rigor. “I worry about what kind of shock they’ll experience their freshman year,” he said.

IDEA students tend to do very well on AP Spanish language and literature exams, but poorly in other subjects, school data show.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is among the most strongest voices pushing states to expand AP access; his Foundation for Excellence in Education writes model bills and provides testimony to support them. (The foundation’s longtime executive director, Patricia Levesque, was also a registered lobbyist for the College Board until earlier this year.) Lately, Bush has been pushing hard to expand online AP classes, provided by an array of public schools and private, for-profit companies.

Bush can point to his state as an AP success story. Nearly 28 percent of students from low-income families in Florida’s class of 2012 passed at least one AP exam, up from 7 percent in 2003, according to the College Board.

But other states have struggled.

College Board data show that while low-income students in Louisiana have been taking more and more AP classes, they rarely pass the exams, and that hasn’t improved much in recent years. The statewide pass rate, for students of all incomes, plunged this year, from 41 percent to 33 percent.

Louisiana Superintendent John White, however, isn’t discouraged. The state has paid to train 1,200 AP teachers in the past two years, which he predicted will raise the quality of instruction. Plus, while the pass rate dropped, AP participation increased so much that Louisiana students earned 1,000 more college credits this year compared to last year. “That is huge for those kids,” White said.

He and others point out, as well, that too many poor students don’t have access to challenging classes. New federal data out this month show that just 38 percent of high-poverty high schools in the U.S. offer AP classes, compared with 71 percent of low-poverty schools.

“We have tended to err on the side of less access to AP classes in the past,” White said. “There’s a value to erring on the side of access for more.”