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110: "College Ready" AP w/ Akil Bello
20 Plays3 years ago
In this episode, Akil & I discuss the history & context of the CollegeBoard and how the AP program in particular fits into CollegeBoard’s vision for “college ready” admissions, how that very vision is undermined by the emphasis on a 3.5 hour exam in May, and what we could be doing instead to crash the gates and actually improve accessibility & equity in the admissions process in the absence of the Advanced Placement signifier.
GUESTS
Akil Bello, Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at Fairtest, founding partner and former CEO of Bell Curves, and contributor on test equitability, learning loss, and much more
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
AP Courses: Rigorous or Overhyped?
00:00:00
Speaker
So if we assume AP is better than other things, then it's a more rigorous course, it helps in admissions, right?
00:00:09
Speaker
But the money part of it, the credit only comes from taking the test.
00:00:13
Speaker
So College Board is kind of like, you know, a person with a hammer who like everything is a nail, like the test is the solution for all the things.
00:00:20
Speaker
And it's really, to me, it's testing because we don't believe or trust teachers.
Meet Akil Bello: Advocate for Fair Testing
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello and welcome to an advanced placement episode of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:34
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington and I'm a social studies teacher from Ankeny, Iowa.
00:00:38
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this special episode is only made possible by supporters who have donated to our May funding drive.
00:00:46
Speaker
Shout out to all who have donated any amount, but huge thanks to our top three donors at the time of this recording, Ryan Boren, Shelley Buchanan, and Donald DeLand.
00:00:55
Speaker
Regardless of when you're hearing this, if you find this podcast and our resources insightful and valuable to your personal and professional learning, consider supporting us at any time at humanrestorationproject.org slash donate.
00:01:11
Speaker
Today, I am joined by Akil Bello.
00:01:14
Speaker
According to akilandfriends.org, Akil began his career in a truly hands-on fashion.
00:01:20
Speaker
He was a test tutor responsible for shepherding thousands of students through exams and training hundreds of instructors, always in the pursuit of empowering students to achieve educational success.
00:01:30
Speaker
Now, Akil is a highly sought-after speaker and frequently presents at high schools, colleges, and conferences about education, access, and preparation.
00:01:39
Speaker
A nationally recognized authority on standardized testing, Akhil has advised universities and currently serves as Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FAIRTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, where he is responsible for building resources and creating tools in support of the organization's mission of advancing quality education and equal opportunity.
00:02:01
Speaker
He last joined our podcast in July 2021 with the release of our 51-page Learning Loss Handbook, which you can find on our website.
High Stakes for Students, High Gains for College Board
00:02:09
Speaker
Akhil helped us contextualize the term, understand the use of standardized test scores, and particularly the marketing behind test companies' push to accelerate learning through diagnostic tests and prep materials in response to pandemic education.
00:02:24
Speaker
Now, over the next two weeks, nearly 3 million high school students are expected to take nearly 5 million advanced placement exams, including my own students, where the stakes are no less than the potential for college credit amounting to tens of thousands of dollars for individual test takers,
00:02:41
Speaker
Also at stake are hundreds of millions of dollars for the billion-dollar nonprofit College Board, whose proprietary advanced placement program is its largest single source of revenue.
00:02:52
Speaker
With the College Board also shepherding the SAT through an era of increasingly test-blind admissions, what could possibly go wrong?
College Board's Admissions Vision vs. Reality
00:02:59
Speaker
In this episode, Akhil and I discuss the history and context of the College Board,
00:03:04
Speaker
and how the AP program in particular fits into College Board's vision for college-ready admissions, how that very vision is undermined by the emphasis on a three-and-a-half-hour exam in May, and what we could be doing instead to crash the gates and actually improve accessibility and equity in the admissions process in the absence of the Advanced Placement Signifier.
00:03:26
Speaker
As a heads up, there's just a few seconds of crosstalk at the beginning of this episode owing to internet lag issues, so forgive me for that.
00:03:34
Speaker
You can find Akil on Twitter at Akil Bello, A-K-I-L-B-E-L-L-O, and at akilbello.com.
00:03:42
Speaker
Enjoy.
Standardized Tests: Flaws and Financial Motives
00:03:53
Speaker
I'm Akil Bello.
00:03:55
Speaker
My day job is Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FairTest, which is the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
00:04:04
Speaker
It's an advocacy organization that advocates for more responsible, transparent, and limited use of standardized tests.
00:04:14
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I am also a 30-year test prep veteran.
00:04:19
Speaker
So I've been teaching people to fill in bubbles
00:04:23
Speaker
since 1990 and I've taught pretty much every test that doesn't require real knowledge.
00:04:30
Speaker
So I've never taught AP explicitly because you actually have to know stuff.
00:04:35
Speaker
It's such an interesting tension or even just such an interesting perspective of yours being a
00:04:41
Speaker
critical of that testing space and while also being part of the test prep side of it, just as like a side of how do you mesh those things?
00:04:49
Speaker
I mean, yours is one of the better critical voices of that.
00:04:52
Speaker
And yet it's like, it's such a necessary or required part for students to get in through those gates.
00:04:58
Speaker
How do you, how do you do that for yourself?
00:05:03
Speaker
I started in test prep, right?
00:05:05
Speaker
So that was sort of my first job while I was in college.
00:05:09
Speaker
Not my first job, but it was one of my earlier jobs in college.
00:05:12
Speaker
So I've been doing test prep forever.
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And I think it's in doing test prep that I've gained an understanding and become more critical of the tests themselves.
00:05:25
Speaker
So as I learned more about their flaws, their limitations, the research behind them,
00:05:31
Speaker
the pseudo objectiveness, all of those things, that's actually what led me to being critical of the test.
00:05:40
Speaker
And the way I look at it right now is the test as they are currently used and exist.
00:05:46
Speaker
And when I say test, I generally mean large scale admissions tests.
00:05:50
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I put APs in a slightly different bucket.
00:05:52
Speaker
I put accountability tests in a slightly different bucket.
00:05:56
Speaker
I think they have overlapping issues, but they're not quite the same.
00:05:59
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But generally speaking, standardized admissions tests, what I ended up coming to is that the way that they're used especially is hugely problematic.
00:06:09
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And I can tell you that because I've spent so long, people pay me money and in six weeks, they move a standard deviation.
00:06:17
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That's a problem.
Elitism in AP: Origins and Impact
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That's not a good result.
00:06:22
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Like that shouldn't be a thing.
00:06:23
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I shouldn't be able to have a 30-year career where someone can pay me money to move their test score.
00:06:30
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So I will happily drive myself out of that business because it's a bad business to be in.
00:06:37
Speaker
Well said.
00:06:38
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I mean, my goodness.
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You have to know the game to play it.
00:06:41
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You know, you got to know your enemy, I suppose, in order to fight it.
00:06:47
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having the AP inhabiting a little bit of a different space than the admissions exams.
00:06:53
Speaker
The last time that we had you on our program was to discuss that concept of learning loss and how it was being leveraged then by the testing industry to sell accelerated learning programs, additional diagnostic tests for students and schools.
00:07:07
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And I think especially at the height of the pandemic, we saw more universities adopting those varying degrees of test optional, test blind admissions.
00:07:17
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And of course, that story wouldn't be complete without bringing in the College Board, which is kind of at the center, the nexus point, I suppose, of both halves of the testing and the advanced placement program that they are also applying.
00:07:30
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the owners of.
00:07:31
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And I just read a stat today that said that AP curriculum, which is ubiquitous throughout American high schools, makes up nearly half of the college board's billion dollar revenues.
00:07:43
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I think it pulled in about $466 million in 2016.
00:07:46
Speaker
I believe it's their single biggest moneymaker.
00:07:50
Speaker
Is it really?
00:07:51
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:52
Speaker
So that $466 million, the difference then is SAT and other things in there too?
00:07:59
Speaker
SAT, springboard, student search, trainings, all the other little things they're dabbling their hands in.
00:08:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:08:10
Speaker
I was wondering if then maybe you could just provide some history.
00:08:15
Speaker
I guess it goes back a long ways, but some context for the college board and I guess AP courses that
00:08:21
Speaker
in particular for the context for this and how do AP courses fit into the College Board's purpose or their vision for college admissions and maybe kind of explore a little bit of the tension between their established purpose and where they are in practice.
00:08:37
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I don't know.
00:08:37
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Unpack that for us.
00:08:40
Speaker
So once you go down the College Board rabbit hole,
00:08:44
Speaker
it is a very strange thing, right?
00:08:48
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Because if you go back far enough, you end up at the origins of testing and the eugenicists who started it, right?
00:08:56
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And then, and I think that that's an important starting point because they haven't fully separated themselves from those origins.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so there's an elitism, a somewhat problematic origin story to standardized testing as a field, right?
00:09:14
Speaker
To College Board as a company and to the AP program as a product.
00:09:22
Speaker
So the AP program itself, I want to say it started in the 50s.
00:09:26
Speaker
It started because kids at the administrators at Andover, Exeter, and some other hoity-toity place, they basically got together and said, when our poor little snowflakes are ending up in college, they're clearly bored because they've had such a great high school experience.
00:09:47
Speaker
They're way too smart for your piddly colleges.
00:09:51
Speaker
So what we want to do is give them accelerated work in high school and they get credit for that in college because they're brighter than the other generic people you're admitting.
00:10:00
Speaker
Right.
00:10:01
Speaker
And I'm exaggerating it a little bit, but it's not far off.
00:10:07
Speaker
So it was their phrases like in the initial meeting, like College Board has on their website, a summary of the early meetings of the group that put together the AP program.
00:10:19
Speaker
And one of the phrases they use that that floored me was it was for able, the ableist students.
00:10:27
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Those who would benefit from advanced instruction, things like that.
00:10:33
Speaker
That's just very clear and demonstrative of the type of elitism and snobbery that centered around the program's creation.
Classroom Experience vs. Test Scores
00:10:47
Speaker
It was essentially designed to give students in these highly exclusive places
00:10:54
Speaker
a leg up when they went to college because they thought they were too good for these basic classes in college.
00:11:00
Speaker
So it was designed as a program for exclusion.
00:11:04
Speaker
It started at the elite boarding schools.
00:11:07
Speaker
Elite, not the right word, but we'll call it that for now.
00:11:10
Speaker
Started at the country club schools.
00:11:11
Speaker
And eventually, now to their credit, we can interpret this whatever way we want to.
00:11:17
Speaker
At some point, 70s, 80s, 90s, College Board decides to expand the program and to actively, aggressively start expanding the program.
00:11:25
Speaker
And they have been continuing that of late.
00:11:28
Speaker
There is sort of an aggressive expansion of the program
00:11:31
Speaker
which also if you kind of look at it from a historical lens, not very many years ago, a bunch of private schools said, maybe we're gonna reject AP.
00:11:40
Speaker
Why would that be?
00:11:41
Speaker
Ah, correlated with the expansion of the program because now the unwashed masses have access to APs.
00:11:50
Speaker
So there's an interesting sort of history of it's not simply let's develop a more rigorous curriculum to help push forward education.
00:11:59
Speaker
It's let's develop programs that allow this small cohort of students to show that they're better than the others and to reap the benefits of showing this.
00:12:11
Speaker
And it really wasn't gonna take off until Harvard came in and said that they were going to accept it as well.
00:12:16
Speaker
They came in late into the conversation, but decided they were gonna accept it as well.
00:12:20
Speaker
But if you fast forward to today, what you have is College Board aggressively expanding the program, which you can cynically look at that and say College Board is aggressively marketing their most valuable product.
00:12:38
Speaker
Or you can listen to College Boys Marketing, which I can't, I don't know the conversation behind this.
00:12:42
Speaker
I'm not going to say what they've decided to do or what motivated it.
00:12:45
Speaker
But you could also say that they're looking to expand equity and give more people access to this blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:12:51
Speaker
There's, sure, that is the language that's also used there.
00:12:58
Speaker
So it is so interesting, isn't it?
00:13:00
Speaker
The way that as the program expands, then as it kind of infringes on that elitism, they have to find a new benchmark for that.
00:13:08
Speaker
And I think when you were talking about that, the first thing that I thought of is my own experience as a teacher of the program when several years ago, I don't remember if it was before or after the redesign of like the AP humanities, but I remember some of the state schools and some of the schools that my students were applying to that had previously accepted threes as counting for
00:13:28
Speaker
their college credit bumped it up in many cases for fours or even fives.
00:13:33
Speaker
So even if they, even without the kind of extremity of just denying AP credits, kind of raising that bar to only capture, say the top 10% of test takers is sort of, you know, an elitism unto itself, isn't it?
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:47
Speaker
I mean, I think that's, that to me is also an interesting thing.
00:13:52
Speaker
positioning for the AP program, right?
00:13:54
Speaker
Because to me, the value comes from the classroom experience, not from the test, right?
00:14:01
Speaker
But as far as, and the classroom experience, if we assume that the course is more rigorous than regular courses, which I'm gonna not express an opinion on that, I don't think I've ever taken an AP course and I've certainly never taught one.
00:14:20
Speaker
So if we assume AP is better than other things, then it's a more rigorous course, it helps in admissions, right?
00:14:29
Speaker
But the money part of it, the credit only comes from taking the test.
00:14:33
Speaker
So College Board is kind of like, you know, a person with a hammer who like everything is a nail, like the test is the solution for all the things.
00:14:40
Speaker
And it's really, to me, it's testing because we don't believe or trust teachers.
00:14:47
Speaker
Right?
00:14:48
Speaker
Like that, that's why we have to have a test that's not written by the teachers who don't trust the teachers, right?
00:14:52
Speaker
Which again, I can understand some of the debates there.
00:14:56
Speaker
But I think it's a really interesting and bizarre approach to say, rather than create a system that fixes problems in education, let's just create these tests that stand apart from it, that have all these problematic correlations that have all these issues on top of it.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead.
00:15:13
Speaker
Let me say, because, you know, in the end, it boils down to, we don't trust teachers.
00:15:17
Speaker
We don't trust the schools.
00:15:18
Speaker
We want to be able to say private school X is better than public school Y. And therefore, let's use APs to, you know, let's use testing as this quote unquote objective thing.
00:15:32
Speaker
I was going to say so much of that dovetails too with the arguments against the colleges that have gone either test blind or test optional in the process, because then they say you have to rely on the students' GPAs and, well, look at the problems regarding grade inflation, the consistency across those things too.
00:15:49
Speaker
Not to get too far ahead of myself, but when I was thinking about the...
00:15:55
Speaker
kind of the alternatives and what we could do instead of this.
00:15:59
Speaker
One place that my mind went to was, of course, that AP curriculum, which is owned, developed, the proprietary intellectual property of the College Board.
00:16:10
Speaker
And of course, in order to teach those classes, you have to submit a syllabus that gets approved directly by some poor person at the College Board who has to click through and read and make sure it checks all the boxes and things.
00:16:22
Speaker
And I sat down with my AP Euro curriculum and I actually saw that this is the post redesign here that it purports to teach what six historical thinking skills, three reasoning processes across nine units of study spanning 570 years and seven themes, and then is assessed over three and a half hours in May using three different writing rubrics and a 55 question multiple choice test.
00:16:49
Speaker
So when I kind of think of, well, what could I do instead of, we call that a more rigorous curriculum, but when I look at the students that I have in front of me who are particularly motivated or enthusiastic about learning history or being in my class in particular, I don't know with the reputation that I have in my district, but
00:17:09
Speaker
But I sometimes I get a little bit sad, I suppose, about what I could be doing with those kids instead of just trying to hammer through to get to a test in the name of, quote unquote, rigor.
00:17:21
Speaker
Like how I could teach an issues in modern nationalism course for dual credit with a community college rather than try to box it up and replace it with a generic question.
00:17:32
Speaker
history survey.
00:17:33
Speaker
So I think rigor is kind of that word at the centerpiece of all of this.
00:17:39
Speaker
And I think one kind of concern is that as testing falls out of favor post-pandemic and students in schools become more reliant on AP,
00:17:51
Speaker
kind of given the tension there between rigor and equity, as you just talked about, and that issue with elitism and differentiating deserving students from less deserving students, what kind of claims does the College Board have to meet
00:18:07
Speaker
those notions that they are providing somewhat of a more rigorous or equitable curriculum for underserved communities, give them a leg up in that admissions process or, you know, replace a curriculum in their homeschool that lacks that certain kind of rigor.
00:18:21
Speaker
I don't know what's out there as far as combating that narrative.
00:18:25
Speaker
That's a good question.
00:18:28
Speaker
I think that the ultimate challenge is, I think the problem is the marketing of it.
00:18:34
Speaker
I think that's really the core of the issue is that when they begin to try to pass off their curriculum as the gold standard, nothing else comes close, like all the marketing of it and the selling of it is actually the problem.
The True Value of AP: More Than a Test?
00:18:54
Speaker
If you just told me it's a challenging program, it's a challenging course, great.
00:19:01
Speaker
But when they start saying, taking a test prepares you for college, then it becomes like, it's just product placement.
00:19:09
Speaker
It's just marketing of a product.
00:19:12
Speaker
So I don't know that I have particular issue with the exist.
00:19:16
Speaker
I don't have issues with the existence of challenging curriculum.
00:19:21
Speaker
I question whether College Board is the right agency to have the position of power that it does and the gatekeeping authority that it does within, when we're talking about college access.
00:19:38
Speaker
Because even as you were just thinking, or as you were just speaking, talking about elitism and colleges using it more, that's actually a small subset of colleges.
00:19:47
Speaker
You know, I don't know how many, you know, I wonder what percentage give credit for A's and for threes and fours versus fives.
00:19:56
Speaker
And I believe that Yale only gives credits for fives.
00:20:01
Speaker
So there's this weird tension between, no, you have to accumulate all of these things, but the accumulation of them costs money.
00:20:13
Speaker
70% of high schools have some kind of AP program, but the volume and scope of AP that's offered is far greater in private schools and in wealthier districts.
00:20:26
Speaker
You can't buy your way to equity.
00:20:28
Speaker
Anything that costs money isn't going to solve the problem of inequity.
00:20:34
Speaker
And so college boards, expensive AP curriculum, no matter how good it is academically, isn't really going to solve the problem of in the fancy school district up the street where kids have a disposable $5,000 to buy AP prep.
00:20:53
Speaker
Of course, they're gonna pass the test at a higher rate because they're not just going to class.
00:20:57
Speaker
They're getting an AP tutor.
00:20:59
Speaker
Right.
00:21:00
Speaker
And so there's all of those issues.
00:21:01
Speaker
I was just speaking to a friend yesterday who said in her school district, the teacher of I want to say it's AP physics has his own thing he does and he gets kids to fives all the time.
00:21:12
Speaker
And then the end of that conversation was and they've been taking practice tests since December.
00:21:17
Speaker
I'm like, what?
00:21:18
Speaker
Huh?
00:21:18
Speaker
Wait, what?
00:21:19
Speaker
Since December to May, they've been taking like weekly or something like that AP practice.
00:21:26
Speaker
That's not a rigorous curriculum.
00:21:28
Speaker
That's test prep.
00:21:30
Speaker
And so of course they pass at a higher rate because they're doing a ton of test prep.
00:21:32
Speaker
And that like should be, that to me kills the value of the program because now it's not about enriched academic experience.
00:21:39
Speaker
It's not about a more thoughtful academic process and learning to think and all that.
00:21:44
Speaker
It's about test prep.
00:21:47
Speaker
So there's challenges that it brings up when you're thinking about what is the purpose of it and what does it do and who does it serve?
00:21:56
Speaker
I want to add to this as well, the kind of monopoly that the College Board has on that curriculum in terms of the people who are allowed to give an input into what that curriculum looks like, and kind of thinking then again, what college credit is awarded for which AP courses.
00:22:14
Speaker
Again, to give a college credit for a course like AP European History, which might be taught in a place that is, you know, the vast majority of students are like,
00:22:23
Speaker
non-white or of non-European backgrounds and not have the option to take a similarly designed or similarly rigorous program that is actually designed by like local stakeholders with input from parents in the community and with students too.
00:22:37
Speaker
I think about the things that we choose to give those college credit to and who, yeah, and who designs those programs compared to the other wonderful set of things that we could actually have students accomplishing
00:22:50
Speaker
say, out in the community, or, you know, having kids run and design, say, their own film projects, or, you know, all the other kinds of things that you can't submit for then those the similar kinds of college credits.
00:23:03
Speaker
But again, if you do AP test prep for six months in the lead up to an advance the exam and get a four or five, we're going to call that good.
00:23:11
Speaker
And that'll take care of some of your electives there.
00:23:15
Speaker
One of the fun things in terms of what you're saying about which classes they selected in that initial AP meeting report, and it's funny because College Board published this in one of their magazines, like, here's the history of the AP program, the first meeting that happened.
00:23:27
Speaker
I think, if I remember properly, it was like the languages that they chose in the beginning.
00:23:33
Speaker
It was like no Spanish, but Latin because like basically I said Spanish was for the plebs.
00:23:40
Speaker
Right.
00:23:40
Speaker
All right.
00:23:41
Speaker
Of course.
00:23:42
Speaker
Of course you did.
00:23:43
Speaker
Right.
00:23:45
Speaker
It's like Latin and Greek, not Spanish because, you know.
00:23:49
Speaker
Well, and then even the AP European history is a holdover from that same line of thinking about Western civilization or a classical education kind of being upheld compared to all other kinds.
00:24:01
Speaker
And even a class like AP comparative government doesn't have anywhere near the numbers of test takers then.
00:24:08
Speaker
an APUSH or an AP Euro does, at least in the humanities, because I'm just speaking within my own wheelhouse
Breaking Educational Gatekeeping
00:24:13
Speaker
here.
00:24:13
Speaker
I don't know about lits and langs and physics and computer science, but it's so interesting.
00:24:20
Speaker
So I wonder then, how do we break that stranglehold?
00:24:23
Speaker
How do we overcome the gatekeepers?
00:24:27
Speaker
How do we... I want to say the language that I've heard in the past is how do we crash the gates?
00:24:33
Speaker
How do we...
00:24:34
Speaker
And really, the shift is about power.
00:24:36
Speaker
It's about putting power back in the hands of the educators in the classroom who know their students the best, into communities who know their schools the best, and what's going to work for their kids, not what's going to work for the college board, board of directors, making six or seven figures, however much they do, at a school far away.
00:24:56
Speaker
How do we crash the gates and take the power back?
00:25:01
Speaker
That's hard, right?
00:25:03
Speaker
Because I think that there's systemic issues.
00:25:08
Speaker
We've been sold for several hundred years a particular definition of academic accomplishment, of what's quality and what isn't.
00:25:20
Speaker
And there's those who want to uphold that system where Latin is valued, but Spanish isn't.
00:25:27
Speaker
Now on the other side of that,
00:25:29
Speaker
That system also led us to huge problems with segregation and particular schools not getting stuff, you know, and testing did expose some of that.
00:25:39
Speaker
And testing does expose, hey, these places are struggling, right?
00:25:45
Speaker
Or at least struggling by this definition.
00:25:48
Speaker
So how do you balance those two contrary things where there is value to exposing that
00:25:56
Speaker
if we're holding out algebra two as the metric of success, this school hasn't passed this algebra two test in the same rate as this other school, right?
00:26:06
Speaker
That's fair.
00:26:06
Speaker
Because if we let them just administer the test locally and they didn't teach algebra two in that school, they just taught algebra one, you'll never find that out.
00:26:14
Speaker
For me, I think the biggest or one of the problems is the way we talk about those things, right?
00:26:22
Speaker
I think one of the problems, especially in testing is
00:26:26
Speaker
it's been equated to ability, aptitude, all of these things that have eugenicist origins and language to it.
00:26:35
Speaker
I even have far fewer problems.
00:26:36
Speaker
It's like, you get a one on the AP, it means, hey, you know, probably a bunch of stuff you weren't taught.
00:26:42
Speaker
There would be very little issue with that, but that's not what you get.
00:26:45
Speaker
You get, oh, you got a one on the AP, you're not college ready, right?
00:26:49
Speaker
You cannot go to an elite school.
00:26:52
Speaker
You're relegated to community college.
00:26:54
Speaker
And then there's all of this,
00:26:57
Speaker
language of that undermines confidence, ability, you know, that doubles down on stereotypes and all that stuff.
00:27:07
Speaker
So I think part of the easy thing for all adults to do right now is to check themselves with the language they use around what these things, what assessments reveal.
00:27:19
Speaker
Generally speaking, assessments reveal what was taught or how you performed.
00:27:28
Speaker
I've been doing SAT prep for 30 years.
00:27:29
Speaker
I guarantee you that if I take the SAT, a timed full length SAT right now, nine out of 10 times, I'm not getting a perfect score.
00:27:36
Speaker
I'm just not that careful.
00:27:38
Speaker
I'm not that careful a person.
00:27:40
Speaker
If you follow me on Twitter, you know the volume of typos in my tweets.
00:27:44
Speaker
Two reasons.
00:27:45
Speaker
One, I don't care.
00:27:48
Speaker
That's not something I care about, right?
00:27:52
Speaker
And two, that's just not how my mind works.
00:27:55
Speaker
Right.
00:27:56
Speaker
So...
00:27:58
Speaker
Does that mean I'm not college?
00:27:59
Speaker
Like, what does it mean?
00:28:00
Speaker
It means that I'm not a careful person.
00:28:01
Speaker
Fine.
00:28:02
Speaker
If you're going to say, let's take the test on carefulness, guess what?
00:28:04
Speaker
Akhil's going to lose every single time.
00:28:07
Speaker
You get a one.
00:28:08
Speaker
Sorry.
00:28:11
Speaker
You get a one on AP readiness.
00:28:12
Speaker
Right.
00:28:13
Speaker
Right.
00:28:13
Speaker
On AP carefulness.
00:28:14
Speaker
I probably get a two because I'm not like horrible, but I'm just bad enough.
00:28:21
Speaker
It's like, oh, you just didn't see that, huh?
00:28:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:23
Speaker
Okay.
00:28:24
Speaker
Fine.
00:28:24
Speaker
Well, you know, with those scores, you're never going to be an AP scholar.
00:28:27
Speaker
You're never going to be just insane.
00:28:30
Speaker
Right.
00:28:30
Speaker
I won't get my, what's the badge they give for having a five on seven APs or whatever the heck it is.
00:28:36
Speaker
Yes.
00:28:36
Speaker
I never think about that, but that just popped into my brain.
00:28:39
Speaker
They do have that hierarchy of like scholarship, where as you progress through the APs, you kind of like unlock the higher, the higher titles.
00:28:47
Speaker
You know, I forget what they are, but one of them has got to be AP scholar or,
00:28:51
Speaker
whatever.
00:28:52
Speaker
And then that, you know, distinguishes you yet again from the, you know, the plebs who got ones and twos on a couple of exams and then decided it wasn't for them.
00:29:01
Speaker
I think there is just, yeah, there's so much danger in especially telling students like I teach sophomores who are taking an AP European history class, which is kind of like held up as being one of the most difficult of the AP humanities courses.
00:29:18
Speaker
And for a lot of kids, it breaks my heart because
00:29:21
Speaker
You know, the way I teach the course, just given that it's me and my attitudes about it, is really more aligned to get them to experience and love history and really get in there and think like a historian.
00:29:32
Speaker
And then, of course, to respect them and their investment and their parents' finances, there's an amount of it that has to be geared towards understanding and being prepared for a test.
00:29:41
Speaker
Right.
00:29:42
Speaker
And that means that you're going to have an hour to write a document-based question in which you will get seven documents.
00:29:49
Speaker
And there's a seven-point rubric that you have to have a context and a thesis, and you have to do these things with the documents.
00:29:55
Speaker
And of course, it's all ludicrous because...
00:29:57
Speaker
take any historian and tell them to write an essay about this prompt and then use the AP rubric, it's probably a farce.
00:30:04
Speaker
Or take any good piece of historical writing and run it through the rubric and it probably will score very low.
00:30:09
Speaker
So I've made my own controversial statements on the fact that I think teaching kids, training kids to think in a way that scores well on those AP tests probably is training them to be poor thinkers and writers.
00:30:21
Speaker
And you don't have to agree or disagree with that statement.
00:30:24
Speaker
No, I think
00:30:24
Speaker
I think it's really interesting to me because it's, I wonder about that all the time, right?
00:30:30
Speaker
Is that like standardized tests are inherently problematic.
00:30:33
Speaker
If we're talking about critical thinking, we're talking about developing learners and things like that.
00:30:37
Speaker
Don't we want the ones that think outside the box?
00:30:40
Speaker
But it's exactly the ones that think outside the box that are challenged on this test.
00:30:44
Speaker
I have students all the time who tell me, well, oh, I was looking at the question this way.
00:30:49
Speaker
I thought it meant that.
00:30:50
Speaker
And it's a completely valid point of view, but the test doesn't reward that point of view.
00:30:56
Speaker
And they have evidence for why they're enforcing their particular narrow definition of things, right?
00:31:03
Speaker
And I've said this a lot to students for SATs that like,
00:31:05
Speaker
This isn't a deep test, right?
00:31:08
Speaker
It actually hurts the deep thinkers.
00:31:11
Speaker
And think about like, if you're teaching literature, you've been teaching these kids for years to read bright white light in the poem and interpret it as heaven and death and this and that.
00:31:20
Speaker
And you come to the SAT and they say bright white light.
00:31:22
Speaker
They want you to go, no, no, there was a light.
00:31:24
Speaker
It was bright and it lacked any hues of other colors.
00:31:31
Speaker
all these years learning to interpret stuff.
00:31:34
Speaker
And now you're telling me I have to take the dumbest, narrowest interpretation of the phrase in front of me.
00:31:38
Speaker
And that's all that's credited.
00:31:42
Speaker
And then further, what we were just saying too means the fact that you might have interpreted that differently then gets you this label of college ready or not at the ripe old age of 15 or 16 is when they start taking these classes if you're a sophomore.
00:31:56
Speaker
And the thing that I think I dislike about teaching APU, I mean, I love having kids that are motivated and want to choose to be in that class.
00:32:04
Speaker
And I've loved seeing my numbers grow over the years.
00:32:07
Speaker
And I think parents are often really appreciative too of
00:32:11
Speaker
the, not necessarily the trash that I talk about the College Board and the AP tests, but the fact that I know that there's more to it than that, and kind of try to walk that line pretty carefully.
00:32:24
Speaker
But the thing I hate to see is then students don't go on to take any more humanities classes after mine, or at least elect to take the more
00:32:33
Speaker
David Buhlman- You know, either the either more ap classes or don't go into any of the more electives after that because they decide, based on their experience in ap European history that maybe the humanities aren't for me.
00:32:44
Speaker
David Buhlman- Maybe i'm more of a stem person or maybe i'm this that are there, so they already start to sort themselves.
00:32:49
Speaker
David Buhlman- By the way that they test or the class made them feel I only got a two so therefore I know that i'm not cut out for this.
00:32:56
Speaker
For 15 and 16 year olds, we're gonna put them in that narrow of a box because they didn't perform well on a test on some day in May when they were 16 years old.
College Board's Expansion: Profit Over Education?
00:33:06
Speaker
I'm out, I'm out.
00:33:08
Speaker
Which is really interesting, right?
00:33:08
Speaker
Because College Board has this weird dichotomy of what are they going to promote and how, right?
00:33:16
Speaker
The newest advertisement, which I've been laughing at, is they've been running this campaign that like, no matter what you score on an AP test,
00:33:25
Speaker
it's still, I want to say they say valuable or it still indicates college.
00:33:30
Speaker
Like all of a sudden they've produced research that said like a one or a two, like is some measure of college readiness or something, which is fascinating, right?
00:33:38
Speaker
Cause it's like, wait a minute, the lowest possible score on your test.
00:33:41
Speaker
Cause a one could mean I walked in the room, wrote my name and scribbled some lines and then left.
00:33:47
Speaker
And so now, because they, and to me it feels like, and I don't know this for real, so I'm making assertions here, but it feels like because they want to expand the use of the product, they've decided that the pitch is just do it, take the test, pay the money, it's all good.
00:34:06
Speaker
yes.
00:34:07
Speaker
And then add on top of it, geez, like, and every, this is why I end up with like, oh, college board is evil, right?
00:34:12
Speaker
It's like every time you turn around, their decision-making seems to be about money, not education.
00:34:21
Speaker
When they claim that the 20 minute micro APs were equivalent to the three hour APs during the pandemic,
00:34:31
Speaker
IB, and then let's juxtapose it, right?
00:34:33
Speaker
Because I don't hate all tests, right?
00:34:34
Speaker
I don't think they're all bad.
00:34:35
Speaker
Like the decision from the IB organization, we just can't give them.
00:34:39
Speaker
There's no way to give a comparable test under the conditions that currently exist.
00:34:44
Speaker
IB is like, yep, we're just letting it go.
00:34:46
Speaker
We can't do it.
00:34:47
Speaker
It doesn't make any sense.
00:34:49
Speaker
College board is like, nope, I can slap something together with some chicken wire and spit.
00:34:54
Speaker
And I can create a 45 minute test that is equivalent to the three hour test, even though you're taking it at home.
00:35:01
Speaker
Like, oh, no, that's standardized.
00:35:04
Speaker
Well, MacGyver, your college entrance exam, you know?
00:35:06
Speaker
Right, that's right.
00:35:07
Speaker
And then they go to colleges and make sure the colleges will take the credit for it.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yep.
00:35:12
Speaker
Which, and all of those sort of behaviors...
00:35:16
Speaker
just make me question the motivating factors behind this decision-making.
00:35:23
Speaker
At every point to me where it seems there could be a decision that's financially motivated or a better decision or a different decision that would foster better educational outcomes, it always seems to be the one that leads to the greatest financial value for a college player.
00:35:40
Speaker
Like what value is there for students in making the deadline to sign up for the AP in October, November, wherever the hell they put it?
00:35:49
Speaker
They're not helping students.
00:35:50
Speaker
What did it add to the discourse that College Board's president came out after the Parkland shooting and said, oh yeah, remember the speech the girl made?
00:35:56
Speaker
She mentioned AP.
00:35:58
Speaker
That's really what we need.
00:36:03
Speaker
But yet College Board won't come out ever when someone misuses scores.
00:36:08
Speaker
North Carolina put out a study that said more than six AP classes don't mean anything to us.
00:36:12
Speaker
It's not particularly indicative of college readiness, this and that.
00:36:15
Speaker
College Board has never said peep as far as I know.
00:36:19
Speaker
about whether that limit should be held to across other colleges, right?
00:36:23
Speaker
They're not encouraging students to take fewer APs because beyond a certain number isn't particularly good and blah, blah.
00:36:30
Speaker
Like they don't do that.
00:36:32
Speaker
But at every opportunity to push it and say, look, AP is lovely.
00:36:35
Speaker
They take that, they take that tack.
00:36:38
Speaker
it's almost like a marketing and branding company that is the front for a testing company or the testing is the front for the marketing maybe is the more apt way to put it.
00:36:49
Speaker
It's hard not to kind of get stuck in sort of a doom loop, I think about it.
00:36:53
Speaker
with my context being an AP European history teacher and knowing that every day I have to kind of humanize that curriculum and humanize that for the students that are just
Humanizing Education Within Constraints
00:37:03
Speaker
in front of me.
00:37:03
Speaker
Like there's some things that are not changeable, but at a systemic level, but I can at least make that process a partnership with the kids in my room, right?
00:37:11
Speaker
Right.
00:37:12
Speaker
But then, yeah, at the systems level, also understanding that that's what I'm like feeding them into that at the same time.
00:37:20
Speaker
So yes, we will kind of diverge and we'll focus on the historical thinking and getting your energy and enthusiasm and doing projects that detract from the curriculum and timeline that's set by the college board and whatnot.
00:37:35
Speaker
But then at the end of the day, coming back and making sure that they understand the seven-point rubric so they can get the good score.
00:37:40
Speaker
Right.
00:37:42
Speaker
It'd be really interesting for me to see what happens to AP programs if the test just goes away.
00:37:47
Speaker
If it was just the curriculum, if you got credit for taking the class in college rather than credit for a particular score on the test.
00:37:58
Speaker
I have never taken one of the tests and I don't have as much issues with the test as I do the SAT because at least the AP is only scored on a five point scale, which is also interesting.
00:38:07
Speaker
The SAT,
00:38:09
Speaker
has 120 different points of distinction because it gives 120 different scores and it covers multiple years of curriculum.
00:38:19
Speaker
Like you're talking about darn, like in math, let's say it's eight through 11.
00:38:25
Speaker
AP covers one year, so narrower curriculum, but they only have four points of distinction.
00:38:30
Speaker
Something doesn't, so like you're telling me that one product is highly more, like the SAT is highly more fine tuned.
00:38:37
Speaker
We can tell you with 120 points of distinction the difference between students.
00:38:42
Speaker
I'd have many fewer problems with the SAT if it were scored on the AP scale.
00:38:45
Speaker
I actually kind of like the AP scale because it sort of says that's like, we're not going to pretend we can make huge distinction between kids.
00:38:53
Speaker
Sure.
00:38:54
Speaker
I kind of like that.
00:38:55
Speaker
But it's just interesting to watch how all these products align and how so much of it boils back down to marketing.
Rethinking Admissions for Equity and Accessibility
00:39:04
Speaker
is there like a silver lining?
00:39:07
Speaker
I just don't want to be a bummer.
00:39:09
Speaker
Like how do we change the damn thing?
00:39:11
Speaker
You know, like if you had to like wave a magic wand, you know, and say, hey, college, this is probably a question you get all the time, Akil, but if you had to like redesign it in a way that you would think would reach true
00:39:23
Speaker
accessibility and equity and also, you know, meet the demands that we have for students to just be prepared to exist in the world as competent adults, you know, what kind of changes would you make on that admissions process either at the gates or kind of before them or I don't know what what what is that picture like in your mind.
00:39:44
Speaker
it would probably do like a 10-year pause on all the testing, just the testing part of it, right?
00:39:50
Speaker
Like no SAT, no AP tests, right?
00:39:53
Speaker
Like, I don't know, five-year pause, just to take that test focus out of your curriculum.
00:39:58
Speaker
Imagine if you didn't have to worry about, can I get them to a three, four, five on the AP, and you just got to teach the curriculum.
00:40:07
Speaker
That just changes the game, right?
00:40:08
Speaker
That just changes the game.
00:40:11
Speaker
Right, so I would really be interested in seeing that.
00:40:14
Speaker
I think it would also be things like maybe put some limitations on how many APs can be taken, you know, just so that the Hunger Games-ness of it all goes away.
00:40:25
Speaker
That you're not trying to kill the student next to you so that you have one more AP than him so that you can potentially secure the spot of this place instead of that place.
00:40:33
Speaker
I think that we would do things that encourage education and the quest for learning over the quest for test scores and admission.
00:40:44
Speaker
And I think that for families, what they have to do is sort of refocus that to the extent that you can
00:40:52
Speaker
make the decisions that lead towards greater educational value rather than the gamesmanship of admissions.
00:41:03
Speaker
And I'll admit, again, I live in the contradiction, so I'll fully admit that I just made it, me and my son, who was in 10th grade, we just had the same conversation.
00:41:13
Speaker
We're choosing classes for next year.
00:41:15
Speaker
It was, are we gonna do this AP class or are we gonna do this other class?
00:41:17
Speaker
I wanted him to do, I feel like it was like,
00:41:20
Speaker
data analytics or something like that.
00:41:22
Speaker
Something that was statistics-ish because he's leaning towards business and marketing and journalism and those types of things, not STEM.
00:41:30
Speaker
So why AP calculus, right?
00:41:33
Speaker
But it's like, but AP looks better for college.
00:41:35
Speaker
Like I never want that conversation for a family.
00:41:38
Speaker
Like let's just do this because it aligns with what you want to do with your life, right?
00:41:43
Speaker
And your interests.
00:41:45
Speaker
But it's hard because we still live in that system.
00:41:49
Speaker
So I think my magic wand would break down all of the educational, the links between the educational decisions that you have to make and the gamesmanship of, will I improve my odds of getting into college X and potentially getting money for college X?
Appreciating Learning Beyond the System
00:42:09
Speaker
That'd be my magic wand.
00:42:11
Speaker
The upshot of it is if you ignore the noise around it, I mean, going to school and learning stuff is pretty cool.
00:42:18
Speaker
No matter like, like, while I as a policy would prefer a private company not control the curriculum, I kind of think that, you know, there's, there's, if we step back and say rigorous curriculum, learning stuff,
00:42:34
Speaker
So it's not all bad.
00:42:38
Speaker
Just from that perspective, take classes where you learn stuff and it challenges you.
00:42:42
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's cool.
00:42:44
Speaker
I think we should do that when we can.
00:42:46
Speaker
As long as we can control how much stakes are put on it, how crazy the outcomes are, how obsessive we are about perfection because of the opportunities that perfection open the door to.
00:43:00
Speaker
Well said.
00:43:01
Speaker
Well, thanks, Akil, for sitting down and chatting with me here.
00:43:04
Speaker
My pleasure.