Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews and Checker Finn debate: “Is AP Good for Everyone?“

It seems that students at top colleges can’t soon shed the feelings of anxiety that accompanied their hypercompetitive high-school careers. Our intern Amy notifies me that the stress that bears down upon aspiring college-goers can manifest itself even more intensely after one matriculates at the university of his or her choice.

Take her high-school classmate, currently studying theater at NYU, who, determined to face his demons, wrote an off-Broadway musical about the dog-eat-dog world of AP testing:

More here.

Washington Post reporter Daniel de Vise writes today that high schools are scaling back “honors” courses as they boost their AP and IB offerings. Some suspect that Post reporter Jay Mathews’s Challenge Index, which ranks high schools based on their participation in AP and IB, is pressuring schools to abandon honors classes for the more rigorous college-prep programs.

Whatever the reasons, critics are probably right that the mid-level rigor of an honors course was a good fit for lots of kids who now will have to either languish in unchallenging lower-level classes or strain themselves in AP or IB. Still, one could argue that the trend is encouraging. First, more college-prep classes mean higher expectations and ultimately, one hopes, higher all-around achievement.

Second, it’s great to see schools embodying two simple but overlooked concepts that gave the world unprecedented gains in productivity and prosperity in the last couple centuries: division of labor and comparative advantage. The folks at AP and the folks at IB focus all their time and energy on making rigorous, comprehensive, well-balanced tests and curricula. By employing their services and products, teachers can focus their time and energy on teaching. Maybe critics are right that there is some kind of perverse rankings-grubbing going on in some of these schools, but one suspects that in most cases, school leaders simply appreciate the convenience and pedagogical value of AP and IB and are consequently wanting to use them more and more.

Well, only if you consider Italian, French lit, Latin lit, and computer science part of the core curriculum. For better or worse, few American students and their teachers treated these as even part of the peripheral curriculum (by last count, only 1,600 students nationwide were taking the AP Italian course, for example). That’s why the College Board is trimming those Advanced Placement courses from its offerings, according to this Washington Post story. A minor retrenchment for the A.P. program? Yes. A major attack on Western civilization? No.