College Board Could Help or Harm Rural Students
Low-wealth school districts, especially those that are also small, often have Sophie’s choices forced upon them. They’re required to sacrifice educationally some of their students as the price for supposedly buying opportunities for others.
To be sure, lots of students fall through the cracks in all kinds of schools. And in some schools those cracks are widened into chasms by poverty, abuse, and the low expectations, disregard, and hostility that accompany the various –isms. Even as thousands of educators and parents and communities and students struggle daily against the circumstance and bad policy that opened the chasms, we haven’t summoned the collective will or wisdom to address the underlying causes.
This is a challenging mix for schools. Add to it insufficient funding, prescriptive curriculum requirements, and policies like minimum school or district enrollment and small, low-wealth districts are forced to make deliberate choices that harm kids.
Here’s how it tends to work; districts are increasingly required to offer a range of classes, usually advanced ones, so those kids who want to go to college have the “advantages” of kids in wealthy districts with lots of curriculum options. When small under-funded districts don’t have the resources to offer all those classes, the “solution” forced on them is to close them and send their students long distances to larger schools in other communities.
One of the problems with this fix is that it in order to see that a few kids get calculus or a third year of foreign language or journalism, for example, a few more kids don’t go to school any more at all, and a few more don’t take any challenging classes. A so-called solution for some kids is a disaster for others.
So it’s been with enthusiasm and relief that many small rural districts have embraced distance education opportunities. Distance education provides a means to offer low-demand classes and other services (often, but not always, advanced courses) for the students who want or need them without having to sacrifice the positive school climate, community support, and personal attention that is essential for the most vulnerable kids and proven to be more common—and more achievable—in small schools and districts.
The ideal forms of distance education link teachers in students in real-time, two-way interaction. Teachers and students see and hear each other and pursue active learning opportunities equivalent to the best classrooms. Two-way distance learning networks strengthen the capacities of schools and communities by allowing them to share their resources and to build their telecommunications savvy and infrastructure. Such networks, along with other opportunities and issues related to distance learning, are explored in a great paper, “The Power and the Promise” available on the Rural Trust website.
In addition to two-way distance learning opportunities, internet-based classes provide important resources for offering classes when there is no teacher or a student has a unique interest. Publicly operated and privately owned “virtual” schools have sprung up across the country and are widely used in schools of all sizes and all income and wealth levels. Virtual classes allow students to take a class that is simply not offered in the school schedule, or only offered at a time that conflicts with another class. They allow students to take classes outside of the regular school day and so help students who are trying to recover credit, expand their school record, or earn college credits. They allow schools of all sizes to continue offering needed classes even if the school loses a Highly Qualified teacher in a hard-to-recruit field the day before the school year starts.
Many of the classes that are offered online as virtual classes are Advanced Placement (AP) courses. These challenging classes are monitored by the College Board and students are allowed to take exams at the end of the class that some colleges accept as equivalent to college credit.
Last week the College Board announced plans to investigate online AP science classes and consider whether the classes can bear a college credit option without a physical lab component. In many of the online science classes, students do all lab work “virtually.” The move by the College Board was prompted by a group of college professors that challenged the classes claiming that students who don’t get the physical hands-on experience of lab work are not adequately prepared for second year college classes. Online educators counter by pointing to the high scores of online students on the AP science tests.
Some people think the move by the College Board represents the most serious threat to-date to online learning opportunities for K-12 students. You can read more about it in an article that appeared in the New York Times or the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. (Note: these links may require registration and may expire over time.)
There’s no question that students who take online classes deserve high quality coursework, personalized instruction, and real opportunity to learn as much as any other student. And there’s no question that not all virtual learning opportunities meet this standard. So, review is warranted.
But the review does raise questions. One of those quesions is about the validity of the testing process. If the College Board doubts that students who score well are actually prepared well, it’s really a doubt about the organization’s ability to adequately measure student knowledge. In that sense it’s good to see such a major player in the American testing industry acknowledge, however obliquely, that single event tests may not be fully adequate measures of what students know and, especially in this case, what they can do.
But let’s hope that the review results in more knowledge about what makes distance and virtual learning instruction effective. Afterall, isn’t that the real purpose of assessment?
More importantly, the review should take pains to ensure that its outcomes do not result in fewer opportunities for students to take challenging courses. And that includes the students who are not enrolled in the prestigious AP classes, but are enrolled in the schools that need those classes made available virtually. The College Board has a real opportunity to contribute important information to the American educational process. And, until fiscal equity is achieved for all schools and students, the College Boardt has a real opportunity to contribute to the educational equity and functionality of the nation's system of schooling its young. It can help eliminate the need for those disastrous choices among students that are currently forced on many good schools and districts.