The AP arms race (San Francisco Chronicle) March 24, 2006

While we worry about nuclear proliferation in Iran and the extensive deployment of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Iraq, there is another arms race in America’s high schools. Educators have dubbed it “the AP arms race.”

AP, or Advanced Placement, testing has exploded in recent years. It began 50 years ago as a small program to challenge a limited number of top high-school students to test out of introductory college courses into a more challenging curriculum. Today, it has mushroomed into a comprehensive scheme that drives decisions about both high-school curriculum and college admissions, while delivering a daily stress test to hundreds of thousands of high school students and their families.

President Bush recently elevated AP testing to the national policy stage, not only giving it a plug in his annual State of the Union address, but also proposing to spend more federal funds so that more teachers will teach, and more students will take, AP courses. Indeed, one of the linchpins of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative is a fourfold increase in AP course enrollment in math and science over the next five years. Now the AP arms race is a federal priority.

At a time when America’s students seem to be underperforming their international peers, what could possibly be wrong with an educational program that is “advanced?” Well, a handful of educators finally are starting to ask that very question about Advanced Placement. Is a testing scheme designed to place top students in more challenging college courses really an appropriate tool to ratchet up the education of large numbers of high school kids? Is preparing students for largely multiple-choice tests the best way to design an advanced curriculum? Is taking a course earlier, in high school rather than in the freshman year of college, necessarily better? The AP arms race assumes that more is better.

More high-school students taking more AP tests makes principals happy, because their schools look better and it satisfies Baby Boomer parents whose kids seek admission to selective colleges. As a result, one-third of high-school graduates now take at least one AP course, twice as many as 10 years ago. The number of tests taken has tripled in the last decade, with a 59 percent increase in the number of students taking the tests in the last five years, according to the College Board.

In the headlong race for more, as a recent study for the National Center for Educational Accountability noted, AP courses are enrolling too many students who simply aren’t prepared. Even as public high schools seek to add more AP classes, a growing number of top private schools are dropping theirs. Why?

Because the standardized tests force teachers and students into a track race to memorize huge chunks of facts to pass the tests, rather than explore important topics in greater depth. As Rachel Stettler, formerly the principal of one school that dropped AP classes, put it, “They emphasize breadth over depth, and they’re content driven rather than focusing on developing skills like critical inquiry, discourse, or ways of approaching a text.”

Finally, colleges are also asking whether acceleration — taking a class earlier, in high school — is really better than enrichment. Another recent study, by two college professors, reports that science students who took AP courses were not significantly better prepared to handle introductory college classes than their non-AP peers. Colleges that used to hand out as much as a full year of college credit for these high-school courses and tests are wisely rethinking their policies.

The College Board, which produces the AP testing and curriculum, has its hands full right now with SAT tests that were scored incorrectly right on the eve of college-admission decisions. Once that crisis is past, I would urge these testing experts to do a little testing of their own AP program. I have a sense that, on its 50th birthday, AP has a midlife crisis that demands further study.

This article appeared on Page B-11.

Diversity of everything but ideas (San Francisco Chronicle) December 26, 2005

Mark 2005 as the year that the dirty little secret of higher education became part of the public conversation. Most of us on college campuses have long known that there is little intellectual diversity in higher education, especially when it comes to political ideas. But we learned to live with it as part of the artificial bubble that characterizes much of campus life.

Consider these recent challenges to the leftward lean of thinking on college campuses:

— Moderate U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander — a former university president and one-time Secretary of Education — told the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that the greatest threat to broader public support and increased funding for higher education is a “growing political one-sidedness which has infected most campuses.”

— The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in its recent report “Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action,” said “the most serious challenge for higher education today is the lack of intellectual diversity.”

— earlier this year, the broad-based American Council on Education issued a statement, supported by 30 higher education organizations, acknowledging the growing concern about “intellectual pluralism” and the “free exchange of ideas” on campuses.

Yes, people are now standing up to say that higher education, which has pioneered in every other kind of diversity — ethnic, gender, same-sex benefits — lacks diversity in the very heart of its mission: the development and transmission of ideas.

A liberal arts education has become politically liberal. The evidence of political one-sidedness on campus is strong, but not really new. Critics point to a survey by three scholars published earlier this year in The Forum showing that 72 percent of professors consider themselves liberal while only 15 percent say they are conservative. In the liberal arts, as opposed to hard sciences, the numbers are even more imbalanced. Studies of political party affiliations of Stanford and UC Berkeley faculty show registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 or 10 to 1. While disturbing, this kind of data isn’t really new.

What seems to be new is a perception by students that professorial political opinions are now very much a part of the classroom, even in a course on Chaucer or biology. Professors once took pride in disguising their own views and making the classroom an objective laboratory of ideas. Now, some argue, in a postmodern world where everything is political, how can politics not be engaged in the classroom? As a result, a survey of students at 50 top universities showed that nearly half the students feel faculty use the classroom to present their personal political views, and that political discussions seem “totally one-sided.”

The academy should take such concerns seriously because a lack of intellectual diversity undercuts the fundamental purpose of liberal arts education: to stretch and grow students through exposure to a wide range of disciplines and ideas. Marketing one political ideology to students throughout their four years of study, as happens on many campuses, not only leads to less intellectual creativity and policy innovation, but it continues to isolate an academic class in its “ivory tower.” No wonder, then, that Sen. Alexander warns that Congress will be less and less interested in supporting a venture that leads to greater political divisiveness in the name of higher education.

So what is to be done to promote greater intellectual diversity on campuses? It won’t be easy, given that tenure protects professors’ jobs and academic freedom is used to defend almost whatever they choose to say. Still, there is plenty that can be done to broaden the range of ideas on campus.

Trustees and administrators should undertake a study of the diversity of thought on their own campuses. One way to balance what is presented in the classroom is to invite a greater diversity of outside speakers, or part-time adjunct faculty. Deans should look at the syllabus for courses to see if a range of ideas is presented in the readings and engage faculty on the issue. It doesn’t violate academic freedom to have a conversation about a professor’s reading list. As one of my bosses correctly said to me, “You have academic freedom to write what you want and I have freedom to say what I want about what you write.” Intellectual diversity should be part of student course evaluations, and should be reviewed at the highest levels.

On the seal of my alma mater are the words, “Let the winds of freedom blow.” We should remember the winds of freedom blow right and center, as well as left, and that, in the academic world of ideas, diversity of thought may be the most important kind of diversity of all.

This op/ed appeared on Page B-5.

Commencements reveal campus values (Scripps Howard News Service) June 19, 2002

The commencement season is upon us and, on more than 3,000 college and university campuses, shorts and baseball caps are giving way to gowns and mortarboards. It is a moment of personal accomplishment and family pride, but graduation also provides a rare public look behind the gates of campus life. When the commencement platform is built and the curtains drawn back, we can see something of the value system that has influenced the next generation during the formative years of college.

For 15 years as a university president, I presided over this rite of passage. In fact, friends noted the irony that, having skipped my own college and law school ceremonies, I was resigned to attending nearly 100 of them in my career. The phrase “poetic justice” comes to mind. In any event, I know the drill, and find interesting clues about campus values and the direction of education from snapshots of this year’s commencements.

Commencement should be a happy time, but the radical politics that pervade the campus year-round cannot be banned from the ceremony. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both faces protestors at commencement addresses at Ohio State and Michigan State respectively. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice, ironically the former provost of Stanford and the most powerful African-American woman in the world, saw similar protests at her Stanford speech. At UCLA, students felt that first lady Laura Bush was not qualified to speak at the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences and protested her invitation. U.C. Berkeley, with its radical reputation, could not attract a top-name speaker this year.

The 2002 award for distasteful politics at commencement surely goes to Professor Bell Hooks of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, who condemned many in her audience for “life-threatening conservatism…and the powerful forces of everyday fascism which use the politics of exclusion and ostracism to maintain the status quo.” Whereas most commencement speakers include some optimistic reference about the future, Professor Hooks found that distasteful, noting that “every imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal nation on the planet teaches its citizens to care more for tomorrow than today.”

The growing role of technology in education is also reflected at commencement time. Mexican President Vicente Fox, whose ban on travel outside the country prevented him from delivering one address, nevertheless made another graduation speech via the Internet. Jones International University held its commencement online, inviting students to view Fox’s address over the Internet, and to mingle afterwards for a reception in a chat room. Students at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of New Mexico used new technologies to display personal messages on a screen when they received their diploma, introducing a potential replacement for those masking tape messages on the top of mortarboards.

Sheer persistence in pursuing education and completing the degree is a valuable message at graduation. That director Stephen Spielberg, for example, could have had dozens of honorary degrees, but went back to Long Beach State to complete his bachelor’s degree, is a wonderful example. Less well-known, but equally inspiring, were the single mother of four who finished her 12-year quest for a liberal arts degree at Santa Clara, or the Radcliffe woman who was denied her degree 63 years ago for not passing the requisite swimming test, but collected it this year.

Of course, commencement also reminds us that college is fun, even wacky. They tried, with only limited success, to limit the tortilla throwing at the University of Arizona this year, and beach balls are common fare at outdoor ceremonies. Although it never rains at Harvard’s commencement, it poured this year, prompting new president Lawrence Summers to forego some of this remarks on “veritas” on account of the “humidatis, not to mention frigiditas.” Sandals, flip flops, umbrellas and plastic garbage bags were part of this season’s Harvard commencement regalia.

Unfortunately this is not an easy year for students to leave campus, with a difficult job market awaiting them. Years ago, comedian Bob Hope gave perhaps the best advice of all to graduates: “Don’t go.”