Teachers and principals from four Denver high schools will receive $2 million worth of training by the national organization that runs Advanced Placement courses and the SAT in an effort to create a culture in urban schools of going to college, officials announced Tuesday.
The teacher training – called the “EXCELerator” program – at North, Thomas Jefferson, South and Abraham Lincoln high schools is intended to improve the quality of AP classes, which are supposed to be college-level. It will also change the English and math curriculums to be more rigorous for all students.
This will be a massive undertaking, which will start in six months, since many of the city’s ninth-graders enter high school learning at below grade level.
At North, for example, only 14 10th-graders are proficient or better at math, according to state test scores.
“It needs to be a change in culture, not just a program,” said Caren Scoropanos of the College Board, which administers AP tests and the SAT nationally. “There needs to be a mindset change.”
Denver’s grant is provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Denver high schools offer AP classes now, but fewer than half the students who take the national AP exams pass those tests, which are given each spring for college credit. In the 2004-05 school year, for example, only 24 percent – 205 students – who took the AP English exam passed. Thirty-four percent, 69 students, passed the AP chemistry test citywide.
“How do we get kids through a good, legitimate AP experience?” said Roxanne Rhodes, a teacher of AP history at Lincoln. “I have one student in the sophomore class, one student, who scored advanced in writing.”
Rhodes said she was elated to receive extra resources for AP on Tuesday. She said she sees a lot of raw intelligence at Lincoln, but not a lot of polish.
“The first thing you remind yourself is that Albert Einstein flunked out of math,” she said. “I teach kids every year I know have an IQ higher than I do, but they don’t have the skills, for whatever reason.”
In addition to more rigorous AP classes, the four schools will be able to expand existing AVID programs – geared to push average or below-average students toward college. They’ll also offer a “College Ed” program to groom kids for college work.
Missing from the College Board’s package, however, is a remediation piece – something schools need, said Van Schoales, urban education officer at the Piton Foundation.
“The good thing is that these are programs with high standards, they want to give kids at North the option to learn Arabic and Mandarin,” he said. “But if most of these kids in the schools can’t read right now, how are you going to get them from ninth grade, not reading, to juniors taking and passing these classes?”
DPS chief academic officer Jaime Aquino said the existing support programs – double classes in reading and math for struggling students and tutoring – will help kids get to their grade level.
He doesn’t necessarily think state assessment test performance translates to whether a student can take AP classes. Students “were actually challenged by the rigor of the AP classes, and in other cases, they were simply bored,” he said.
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
