Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tackling Pre-AP classes
Fayetteville High participating in pilot program for freshmen.
FAYETTEVILLE — High school teachers and administrators gave mostly positive feedback to the College Board’s Pre-Advanced Placement program, which is being rolled out this year at select schools across the nation.
“It’s been a huge success so far,” said Mark Oesterle, executive director of secondary education for the Fayetteville School District.
Fayetteville High School and Arkansas High School in Texarkana are two of about 100 schools participating in the pilot program for freshmen. Another 100 schools will be invited to participate next school year. The program will be available to all schools starting with the 2020-21 academic year.
All of Fayetteville’s roughly 700 freshmen are taking at least one Pre-AP class this semester. The school’s 147 sections of Pre-AP courses have a total enrollment of 3,264, according to Oesterle.
Fayetteville offers Pre-AP courses in English, biology, world history and geography, Algebra I, art and theater.
The College Board owns, develops and publishes the SAT and Advanced Placement program tests. Schools long have offered classes they called “pre-AP,” but starting in two years, any class labeled as such must meet the board’s guidelines. The benefit is a consistent curriculum that has been vetted by the board, backed by research showing it will help more students be successful in upper-level courses, Oesterle said.
The first few months of the school year have shown students of all social and economic backgrounds can succeed in the more rigorous classes, Oesterle said.
“When provided with the tools and high-quality teaching, students are rising to the challenge,” he said.
Arkansas High School teachers have bought into the program, said Anne Formby, the school’s Pre-AP coordinator.
“They like what the College Board has presented them with because it is getting the kids to think, and it gets them to delve into a problem at a higher level than what has been done previously,” Formby said.
Advanced Placement teachers are excited because they see Pre-AP students are doing work similar to what they’ll encounter in AP classes, she said.
“For instance, in history, they’re teaching them to do document-based questions they’ll have to do in all AP courses,” Formby said. “In science, they have labs and they have to look at data and talk to each other about what’s going on. In the classroom, I see kids talking and working together to come up with a solution.”
Arkansas High School has 155 freshmen taking at least one Pre-AP class.
All Pre-AP courses are designed to give students a foundation to develop the skills they need for success in high school and beyond, according to a Texarkana School District news release. Pre-AP courses prepare students for AP and other college-level coursework.
Research indicates students who participate in AP courses have a higher retention rate in college than nonAP students of similar background and ability, according to the release.
The two-year pilot program gives the board time “to learn, make changes, communicate more clearly, add supports, and possibly take the program in directions we hadn’t thought about because of some of the feedback that we’ll get,” said Auditi Chakravaty, the board’s vice president of Pre-AP programs.
Chakravaty and two other board representatives spent Nov. 7 at Fayetteville High School to observe and collect feedback on the program. Pilot schools are asked to share their classroom experiences with board officials as they try out the curriculum.
During a lunch-hour gathering in the library, they met with teachers to hear how they’re faring.
Mathew Holden, a Pre-AP biology teacher, called the lessons “engaging” but said sometimes the quizzes don’t tie directly to the objectives, so teachers must provide additional materials for students. As a former wildlife biologist, Holden said he appreciated the board’s use of real-world data and investigations.
Kaitlin Brink, a Pre-AP English teacher, said the curriculum has allowed her students to slow down and “really read closely, read multiple times, which I think is a great skill for every subject area.”
She and other English teachers found a lot of ninth-graders didn’t have the skills necessary for some of the lessons, so they had to build in lessons on things like literary analysis and grammar.
“I was trying to think back when I started lit analysis,” Brink said, recalling her own high school days. “It probably would have been junior or senior year. Starting it now in ninth grade, it’s great, but it is a struggle for them. So we’ve all had to adapt, create our own outlines and really model this for students.”
Joely Negedly, a senior director of Pre-AP curriculum and instruction at the board, said many ninth-graders don’t have much experience with literary analysis.
Part of the rationale for building that into the curriculum is to prepare students for Advanced Placement English as well as the SAT, the standardized college entrance exam produced by the board. That’s where students typically struggle on the SAT, Negedly said.
“That’s kind of why we thought, let’s start easing it in in ninth grade,” Negedly said. “But yeah, it’s work, isn’t it?”
Jay Dostal, in his first year as Fayetteville High School’s principal, said his 10th-grade daughter is in a “grueling” course. If she’d had to take a Pre-AP course, she probably would have been better prepared for the rigor, he said.
“I’m excited that all of our kids are going to have equity and access to this,” he said. “I truly believe that kids are going to meet the bar that we set for them, and Pre-AP has allowed us to at least set a little bit higher bar.”
He added he has enjoyed watching teachers struggle through the new curriculum because it’s been a good learning experience for them, too.