I live in an East Coast city which is struggling with a host of problems…an all too familiar litany of deeply disturbing consequences of long-term poverty: unemployment, drugs, crime and schools where too many are doing far too poorly.  As a high school teacher I would often talk to students about college and what a good idea it was:  lots of kids, a small group of earnest adults, and good libraries.  It’s the way I feel about schooling; the way schooling was for me from my first experiences in Chicago at Lawson Elementary (?) through to graduate school…and on through my years as a teacher.  But how very different things must be if so many of our children are choosing to leave school first chance they get.  Just look at the basics.  On the one hand you could be inside where it is warm and dry when it is cold and wet outside, surrounded by kids your age, and the task before you is to come to a fuller appreciation of our culture and its many roots reaching back to classical antiquities in Greece, the Middle East, India, China and everywhere…and indeed reaching all the way back to ice ages, migrations out of East Africa, to the flourishing of mammals some 70 million years ago, even to the first cellular organisms in primordial seas.  Or, you could be standing out on a corner.  What are we doing that so many choose the corner?

Now we come to the recent news story…a story about AP testing.

First let’s try to make sense of the data.  This can be very tricky.  I remember being very confused by data on student drop out rates.  Then I realized that instead of talking about the percentages of students who had started out as freshmen but had not graduated, they meant the number in the senior class who had failed to graduate…a much smaller figure.

So back to AP tests.  The article is reporting on the percentages of students who graduated in 2010 and had passed at least one AP exam with a 3, 4, or 5.  This is not the percentage of students who took the test and passed, but the percentage out of the graduating class who had passed at least one.  Unless everyone had taken an AP exam, this number is inherently smaller than the percentage that actually took an exam and passed.  I assume the value of this number is for comparison purposes.  It is getting at the over-all “strength” of the graduating student body.  I put strength in quotation marks because I question the value of AP programs, but we’ll get to that later.

Out of the more than 30 high schools in the city, most had 0 % passing rates for the graduating classes.  One school had a passing rate of 0.7 % which corresponds to one student out of every 142 in the graduating class passing at least one exam.  For the city as a whole 3.5 % passed at least one.

One other number strikes me as significant: the number of students taking AP exams has doubled over the last decade.

How does this all add up?