Suburbs celebrate success with AP

Three Franklin County school districts just landed on a national list for expanding students’ participation in Advanced Placement classes and improving exam scores.

Before going on winter break, Grandview Heights High School served cake to the entire student body to celebrate landing on the annual AP Honor Roll twice in a row and three times altogether since the College Board started bestowing the honor eight years ago.

Bexley and Reynoldsburg also were honored this year, based upon the past three years’ participation and scores. Plenty of other central Ohio districts have made that list at least once, and some multiple times, including Hilliard, Dublin, Olentangy, Worthington, Granville and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus, among others.

According to 2016-17 Ohio Department of Education data, among public school districts, Upper Arlington schools ranks seventh in the state for its rate of participation, with 72 percent of students taking AP courses, and Bexley schools ranks eighth, at 70.6 percent.

Performance-wise, Bexley High School comes in fourth statewide for the percentage of students last school year, 70.9 percent, who scored 3 out of 5 or above on AP exams. Ranking higher were Walnut Hills High School in the Cincinnati schools (81.1 percent), Wyoming High School (78.3 percent) and Indian Hill High School (75.6 percent).

AP courses are intended to be introductory collegelevel material and workload. The national program has expanded over the years to 38 course offerings, from traditional subjects such as English and history to studio art and microeconomics.

Many schools give additional weight to the grade-point averages of students who take AP classes, boosting their class rank. On the exams, if a student can earn at least a “passing” score of 3 on a 5-point scale, he or she might be able to skip some prerequisite classes or even earn college credit. Plus, it can indicate to college admissions officers that students are willing to challenge themselves and can handle undergraduate life.

But even though the program has existed in U.S. high schools for more than 60 years, there are still Ohio schools in which AP is rare to nonexistent.

Columbus City Schools has a district average of 13.5 percent of students participating in AP, and most of that comes from four schools: Columbus North International 7-12 (45.1 percent), Columbus Alternative (40.5 percent), Centennial (23 percent) and Northland high schools (16.1 percent).

Among central Ohio schools where participation particularly lags are Licking Heights High School near Pataskala (1.6 percent of students), Whitehall Yearling High School (5.7 percent) and Hamilton Township High School near Obetz (10.6 percent of students).

They’re still doing better than most: Almost a quarter of Ohio’s 608 school districts don’t have any students involved in AP. That proportion grows to nearly half when including school districts with lower than 10 percent participation.

For the Class of 2018 in Ohio, passing an AP course and then scoring a 3 or higher on the exam is one of several tasks that students can complete to earn a diploma.

Researchers have pointed out that it’s difficult to assess the true value of Advanced Placement. AP students are more likely to be white, come from higher-income families and have better academic preparation than the non-AP students.

Besides a few outliers, that pattern plays out locally, too: The public districts with the lowest levels of economic disadvantage tend to have the highest participation and scores.

The College Board uses PSAT scores of high schoolers as a predictor of whether they are “AP ready.” Of minority students nationwide who score high enough to be ready Bexley Canal Winchester Columbus Dublin Gahanna-

to take an AP course, only about half of them do, the College Board says.

In 2013, Stanford researcher Denise Pope evaluated 20 studies of the AP program. She criticized the ones that show a causal relationship between taking AP classes and college performance. It’s not that simple, she said, because AP students tend to be more motivated and advanced than their peers to begin with.

Plus, Pope said, AP classes actually could turn out to be a detriment to the rest of the school if the best teachers and resources are reserved for a cluster of high-achieving kids, depriving other students.