Tom Stanley-Becker is an AP dropout. The young man writes today in the Los Angeles Times:

The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement—with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper. Bound by the exam, my history teacher wistfully says we have to be ready in early May.

AP and IB are rigorous programs (as we’ve noted), and when compared to the usual public-school classroom experience, they dazzle. But for students who want to learn more than surface facts, who desire a deep and engaging dialogue with the material they’re covering, AP and IB can be profoundly unsatisfying. Educators have every incentive to “teach to the test,” and no incentive to encourage their classes to think critically or to spend time penning essays that do more that recite facts. AP and IB programs can suffer from the same problems that hurt NCLB.

Some say: “But AP and IB students must learn the basic facts first; they can react to them later.” But “later,” which presumably means “in college,” often never comes because university freshmen are no longer required to take real subjects but may, instead, opt for semesters of feminist literary theory. Furthermore, why can’t advanced high-school kids learn facts and react/relate to them simultaneously?