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Writer's pictureJoanne Jacobs

Most challenging schools are charters educating low-income students


Students at an IDEA charter in El Paso, Texas.

Urban charters in high-poverty areas have become the most challenging high schools in the country, as measured by students taking Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge exams, writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.


In 1998, when he started his Challenge Index, the top 20 public high schools were in affluent neighborhoods with lots of college-educated parents. Now, most of the top 20 on the Challenge Index are high-poverty schools such as IDEA McAllen near the Texas-Mexico border or KIPP University Prep in San Antonio. Most students are Hispanic or black.


The IDEA network, which runs 143 schools, mostly in Texas, dominates the list. "IDEA has joined KIPP, Uncommon and a few other charter networks in achieving surprising success raising achievement for low-income students through college-level courses, energetic teaching and longer hours," writes Mathews. "A veteran charter educator who knows IDEA well has told me he thinks that the network’s success is a result of a top-down strategy that tells teachers exactly what to do in every minute of the school day."


Mathews' index rewards schools who push students to take advanced exams -- graded by outsiders who don't know the students -- but doesn't look at how well students score. He believes what matters is that students try hard things, not whether they master college coursework in high school. Struggle pays off, he argues.


I worry about schools that label courses "AP," but don't really teach at an advanced level. It looks good to have a lot of students in AP (or IB or Cambridge) courses, even if they're not prepared to do the work or to pass the exam.


I also worry about the pressure to lower standards and inflate grades. College Board is "recalibrating" AP exam grading to match lower college expectations.

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2 Comments


linda.g.oc
Jul 25

I call BS. Taking an AP class (most likely “AP”) means nothing; getting at least a 3 on the test is what matters.


I am well-acquainted with the “AP” shenanigans in low-performing DC-area schools;all the way back to the beginning of Mathew’s Challenge Index. Pushing grossly unprepared kids into “APs” amounts to educational malpractice and outright fraud. A regular commenter on Mathew’s WaPo column identified himself as an AP English teacher in a low-performing district; which nevertheless had required all seniors to take an AP class. In practice, this meant English and US history. He said that most kids’ average reading level was 5th grade; rendering the AP label (and gpa boost) meaningless and depriving the kids prepared for AP…

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Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Jul 26
Replying to

Cambridge baccalaureate (that is, Cambridge Assessment's syllabuses for the English Baccalaurate, a performance benchmark used in England to measure how well schools prepare students for courses of instruction at the international baccalaureate levels) courses offer superb preparation for AP exams: I use them regularly with local (and occasionally other) 10th-grade students to prepare them, in the 11th grade, for the AP English Literature & Composition exam in May, and have gotten nothing but 5s on them in recent years.

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